Building Dasera During COVID: Lessons in Remote Product Development and Customer Discovery in a Crisis
Four months into building a new enterprise security company, the world stopped. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Dasera founder Ani Chaudhuri shared how they turned pandemic constraints into strategic advantages during their company’s most formative period.
The Pre-COVID Foundation
The journey began with intense customer discovery. As Ani recalls, “Noah and I kind of, in the first six months, what we did was we interviewed a lot of people, trying to understand the problem and defining it very tightly.” This early investment in understanding customer needs would prove crucial when in-person meetings became impossible.
The COVID Impact
The timing couldn’t have seemed worse. “Within, I think, four months of the company’s founding Covid hit,” Ani shares. “And it was almost like the world had come to a standstill in many aspects. We weren’t even sure how this would all end up.”
Turning Crisis into Opportunity
Rather than freezing in uncertainty, Dasera used this period to refine their product vision. What started as an insider threat tool focused on SQL query inspection evolved into something much broader. As Ani explains, they “kind of evolved the product to a point where we not only look at insider threat, but the entire data lifecycle.”
The Remote Discovery Advantage
The shift to remote work actually accelerated certain aspects of customer discovery. Security leaders, suddenly dealing with distributed workforce challenges, became more accessible for virtual meetings. This helped Dasera identify emerging needs around data security in remote environments.
Building for a Changed World
The pandemic highlighted new security challenges. With data breaches tripling in three years (“last year alone, it was like 2400 breaches”), Dasera’s focus on comprehensive data security became even more relevant. They recognized that “less than 1% of all companies have a data security strategy in place that is mature.”
The Product Evolution
During this period, Dasera expanded their platform to handle “structured, semi structured, unstructured and application data in the cloud and on prem.” This broader vision was directly informed by the changing needs of organizations adapting to remote work.
Remote-First Go-to-Market
The pandemic also shaped their go-to-market strategy. Instead of traditional enterprise sales tactics, they focused on removing friction through innovative pricing (“$500 per datastore per month”) and strategic partnerships. As Ani notes, they “re-architected our product for partnerships and oems” during this period.
The Market Education Challenge
Remote selling required a different approach to market education. “Last year was a year where people were educating themselves about data security,” Ani explains. This led to a strategy of enabling self-education through accessible pricing and partnerships.
Keys to Remote Success
Several factors enabled Dasera’s success during this period:
- Strong pre-COVID customer discovery foundation
- Flexibility in product vision
- Embrace of remote-first sales
- Focus on reducing friction
- Strategic use of partnerships
Looking Forward
The lessons from building during COVID continue to shape Dasera’s approach. As they look toward emerging challenges like enterprise AI, which Ani notes is “going to be a bigger headache than any chat GPT that you are thinking about today,” the ability to adapt and evolve remains crucial.
For founders building companies in uncertain times, Dasera’s experience offers valuable lessons. Rather than seeing crisis constraints as limitations, they can be opportunities to rethink conventional approaches to product development, customer discovery, and go-to-market strategy.
As Ani’s experience shows, sometimes the most challenging circumstances can drive the most innovative solutions. By staying focused on customer needs while remaining flexible in their approach, Dasera not only survived the pandemic but emerged stronger, projecting “five to ten x growth this year.”