Gombach’s Design Partner Strategy: Building Enterprise Products With Customer Feedback, Not Just For Them

When building deep tech products, the conventional wisdom of “launch fast, iterate often” doesn’t always apply. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Gombach founder Ian Amit shared how their strategy of deep collaboration with design partners helped them build a more robust product, even though it meant a longer path to market.

The Extended Development Challenge

“It took a year. It took even a little over a year,” Ian reveals about their journey to first paying customer. This wasn’t a case of slow execution – it was a deliberate choice to build something fundamentally new. “This is not your typical ‘oh, let’s build a security product that’s a single pane of glass.’ This is actual deep tech where we’ve had to build AI algorithms that did not exist before.”

The Role of Design Partners

Rather than rushing an incomplete product to market, Gombach invested in relationships with potential customers who could provide ongoing feedback. “Thankfully, we still have really phenomenal design partners that stood by us and provided feedback all along the way,” Ian explains, “and that allowed us to be really accurate and provide solutions that actually address real world problems that CISOs are experiencing.”

Converting Experience into Product

This collaborative approach was particularly valuable because Gombach was building something that hadn’t existed before. “We have to tailor everything to each and every customer’s environment,” Ian notes. “So again, the promise was really great. And even though I knew it was going to take some time to build the actual platform, it took a little more than I thought.”

The Validation Process

Even with his extensive CISO experience, Ian insisted on thorough validation with potential customers. “I insisted on speaking with new people that didn’t know me and didn’t have the bias of kind of patting me on the back like, ‘hey Ian, great, you’re building a startup. Of course this is super relevant because I know you.'”

From Skepticism to Partnership

The initial response from potential customers often started with skepticism. As Ian describes, “Sometimes they’re like, yeah, if that would have worked, this would have been amazing.” This skepticism actually helped strengthen their product development process, as it forced them to prove their solution’s effectiveness conclusively.

Building Trust Through Transparency

Instead of making grand promises, Gombach maintained transparency about their development process. Their approach was to be “in your face realistic” about what they could and couldn’t do, building trust through honesty rather than marketing hype.

Lessons for Deep Tech Founders

Gombach’s experience offers several key insights for founders building complex technical products:

1. Choose design partners who can provide genuine, unbiased feedback
2. Be transparent about development timelines and challenges
3. Use skepticism as a tool for product validation
4. Focus on solving real problems rather than rushing to market

The Long-term Impact

This patient, collaborative approach has paid off. The design partners who stood by them during development have become advocates for their solution, helping validate their approach to cloud security remediation. As Ian notes, these relationships helped them “provide solutions that actually address real world problems that CISOs are experiencing.”

For founders building enterprise products, particularly in deep tech, Gombach’s experience shows the value of building strong relationships with design partners during extended development phases. While it may take longer to get to market, the resulting product is more likely to address real customer needs effectively.

The key is finding the right balance between maintaining development momentum and incorporating valuable feedback. As Ian’s experience shows, sometimes the best way to build a product is to do it in close collaboration with the people who will eventually use it.