Beyond Features: How Nisos Combined Human Expertise with Tech Scale

The conventional wisdom in B2B SaaS is clear: automate everything. But in a recent Category Visionaries episode, Nisos CEO David Etue revealed why doubling down on human expertise – while making it more scalable through technology – proved to be their winning formula.

The False Choice of Humans vs Technology

Most companies see a binary choice between human expertise and automation. But Nisos identified a fundamental problem in the intelligence market that required rethinking this tradeoff. As David explains, “What’s fascinating about this $6 billion cyber threat intelligence market is that it actually doesn’t sell intelligence. It sells data or information.”

The distinction matters because “intelligence is information that’s curated to enable a timely, actionable and relevant decision.” Pure automation could deliver data, but turning that data into actionable intelligence required human judgment.

Building for Scale Without Sacrificing Quality

Rather than trying to eliminate the human element, Nisos focused on making their analysts more effective through technology. “Our products are combinations of people, process and technology,” David notes. “But in our case, it’s our people who are a superpower and it’s our people who enable our clients to be heroes.”

This approach required rethinking how they delivered services. Instead of billing for analyst time, they created standardized offerings that leveraged technology to make their experts more scalable. The result? They took subscription revenue “from nearly zero to 20% subscription revenue business to north of 90%.”

The Impact on Customer Success

The hybrid model proved particularly powerful for customer retention. While traditional intelligence vendors struggled with churn, Nisos achieved over 108% net dollar retention. As David explains, “Even if you’ve built the best data feed for something, if your customer can’t bring it to life, that creates a value challenge and a renewable challenge for you.”

By combining human expertise with technology enablement, they solved both the scalability and value delivery challenges. Their analysts could serve more clients effectively while ensuring the intelligence delivered was immediately actionable.

The Role of Trade Craft

The founders’ background in intelligence operations shaped their thinking about scale. “They founded Nisos on that mission, but importantly, then also hired amazing talent and from day one had the north Star of ensuring that our clients are successful in managing risks and remediating incidents.”

This meant investing heavily in both people and technology. “They stepped back and said, hey, I think we have, instead of being a consulting company, as they were founded, to really look at how we could invest in the trade craft, our intelligence trade craft and importantly, technology enablement to transform how intelligence was delivered.”

Keys to Making the Model Work

Several factors proved crucial to successfully scaling this hybrid approach:

1. Standardized Offerings: Moving away from custom consulting to clear, packaged solutions
2. Technology Enablement: Building tools that amplified analyst capabilities rather than replacing them
3. Clear Value Metrics: Focusing on customer outcomes rather than analyst hours
4. Process Optimization: Creating repeatable workflows while maintaining analysis quality
5. Selective Automation: Automating routine tasks while preserving human judgment for critical decisions

Lessons for Founders

The Nisos story offers valuable insights for founders building hybrid businesses:

1. Don’t assume everything needs to be automated – identify where human expertise truly adds value
2. Focus on making experts more efficient rather than trying to eliminate them
3. Use technology to standardize and scale processes while maintaining quality
4. Build pricing models that align with value delivery rather than resource utilization
5. Invest in both talent development and technology enablement

The key takeaway? Sometimes the path to scale isn’t about choosing between humans and technology, but about finding innovative ways to combine them. As Nisos demonstrated, when done right, this approach can create sustainable competitive advantages in even the most technology-driven markets.