How Vali Cyber Built Technical Credibility: The Open Source Validation Strategy

Technical buyers don’t trust marketing claims – they trust code. This reality shaped Vali Cyber’s unique approach to building credibility in the enterprise security market.

In a recent Category Visionaries episode, CTO Austin Gadient revealed how they tackled one of the most challenging aspects of selling security software: proving performance claims to skeptical technical buyers.

Their solution? Create open-source tools that let potential customers validate claims independently. “Another thing that we did is we built some tools that make it easier for someone to validate our claims. One of them is called security perfect,” Austin explains. “Because that tool is open source, anyone can go with the code, you can run it themselves. They know exactly what we’re testing.”

This approach emerged from a deep understanding of their technical audience. “Technical buyers are not people that respond to marketing hype and fluff… Once they hear that sort of language, I think it turns them off very quickly,” Austin notes.

The company’s commitment to transparency extended beyond just tool creation. “I think it was very important to be transparent and truthful about what we’re providing and what our product could and could not do,” Austin shares. “You definitely don’t want to oversell. I think that’s very easy way to lose a customer early on if you try to promise things that aren’t true.”

This validation-first strategy proved particularly valuable given their target market. “We really needed to find those enterprise organizations that had lots of Linux systems and that also had a really dire need to protect them,” Austin explains. “Financials would be a great example of organizations that have lots of Linux systems, and the consequences of them failing to protect those systems are very severe.”

Their approach to building credibility involved multiple layers:

1. Open-source validation tools that allowed independent verification
2. Technical messaging that avoided marketing hype
3. Transparent communication about product capabilities
4. Relationship-based selling with experienced teams

The strategy paid off particularly well with sophisticated buyers. “We found a lot of success in relationship based selling and working with sales teams that have a lot of experience in the space,” Austin notes. These relationships, combined with verifiable performance claims, helped overcome the natural skepticism of technical decision-makers.

Looking ahead, Vali Cyber sees this foundation of technical credibility as crucial for scaling. The challenge now is maintaining this high standard of validation while growing. “We need to figure out how to scale beyond that as the company grows and build our messaging in a way that will attract organizations to reach out to us as opposed to us reaching out to them,” Austin explains.

For B2B founders selling to technical buyers, Vali Cyber’s approach offers a valuable lesson: in markets where trust is paramount, giving customers the tools to verify your claims can be more powerful than any marketing message. Their experience shows that building technical credibility isn’t just about making claims – it’s about empowering customers to validate those claims themselves.