Gombach’s Year-Long Path to First Customer: Why Some Deep Tech Products Can’t Be Rushed

The startup playbook usually reads: launch fast, iterate often. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Gombach founder Ian Amit revealed why this approach doesn’t always work for deep tech companies – especially when building solutions that have never existed before.

When “Move Fast and Break Things” Doesn’t Apply

“It took a year. It took even a little over a year,” Ian admits about landing their first paying customer. What’s remarkable isn’t just the timeline, but the deliberate choice to take the slower path. “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, they only existed in the academic world.”

The Reality of Building Never-Before-Seen Technology

The challenge wasn’t just technical complexity – it was creating something fundamentally new. “We have an automated way to ingest cloud documentation from the provider,” Ian explains. “We have an automated way to our cloud configuration from customers infrastructure as code templates, and an automated way to match those two things together and basically apply a security policy that generates contextual code changes that are suited for that customer environment.”

This meant building without shortcuts: “There’s basically no signatures, no shortcuts, no blueprints to rely on. We have to tailor everything to each and every customer’s environment.”

Managing Investor Expectations

How do you keep investors confident during such an extended development period? “My investors will hate me for saying this,” Ian notes candidly, acknowledging the tension between market pressure and technical necessity. The key was maintaining transparency about the technical challenges while demonstrating consistent progress.

The Role of Design Partners

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

The Universal Challenge of Timeline Estimation

Even with careful planning, development timelines often expand beyond initial estimates. As Ian reflects, “Things are going to take twice as long, they’re going to cost twice as much. You factor that in and somehow it still takes twice as long and cost twice as much. I don’t know how that math works, but that’s the case no matter what.”

Lessons for Deep Tech Founders

For founders building complex technical solutions, Gombach’s journey offers several key insights:

1. Be realistic about development timelines for truly innovative technology
2. Build strong relationships with design partners who can provide ongoing feedback
3. Maintain transparency with investors about technical challenges and progress
4. Focus on solving fundamental problems rather than rushing to market with partial solutions

The pressure to launch quickly is real, but for some deep tech products, taking the time to build solid foundations isn’t just an option – it’s a necessity. As Gombach’s experience shows, sometimes the best way to serve your market is to resist the urge to rush, focusing instead on solving fundamental problems in ways that create lasting value for customers.

The Validation

The extended development time has positioned Gombach to address challenges that more rapidly developed solutions couldn’t tackle. “We’re right there in the middle of that debate because what we’re doing is we’re providing, we’re doing a lift of the grunt work a lot of engineers are forced to do right now,” Ian explains, highlighting how their thorough approach is enabling them to tackle larger, more fundamental challenges in cloud infrastructure management.