Inside Aserto’s Two-Track GTM: How They’re Selling to Both B2B SaaS and Enterprise

Most startups focus on a single customer segment to avoid spreading themselves too thin. But what happens when your product solves critical problems for two distinct markets? In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Aserto founder Omri Gazitt revealed their strategy for simultaneously targeting both B2B SaaS companies and enterprises.

The Two Tracks

Aserto has identified two distinct customer profiles with different but related authorization challenges:

“B2B SaaS vendors that want to move from a coarse grained authentication model… to a fine grained authorization model,” Omri explains. These companies face pressure when “their customers come in and say, hey, you have an admin role and that’s no good for me because I have 100 Widgets and 50 of them are owned by this department, 25 by this department, and then I have 17 other departments that own the rest.”

The second track targets “enterprises that want to create a common authorization control plane for a number of their internal applications.” These organizations struggle because “they basically have a constant set of users and groups and they just want to be able to assign permissions and roles to these users across a number of applications that they build in a common way.”

The Common Thread

Despite serving different segments, both face the same core challenge. As Omri notes, “Today every application kind of builds their own permissions, their own RBAC model and so it’s impossible for them to manage that. It’s like a combinatoric problem.”

Building Market Pull

Aserto’s approach to both segments remains grounded in market reality. “We have a lot of good early indications that the problem that we are solving resonates and resonates strongly,” Omri shares. “But for product market fit… you really want there to be strong pull from the market on your solution.”

The Standards Strategy

A key part of serving both markets involves standards development. “You don’t want to kind of go in too early because pre-standardizing things before you actually have some market pull is dangerous,” Omri warns. “But for this to really grow as a category… we’ll have to go create some standards and then compete within those standard frameworks.”

Market Education Through Pain Points

Rather than generic marketing, Aserto focuses on specific pain points. When SaaS vendors’ customers demand more granular controls, they realize “I don’t want to have to go build and rebuild this all myself every time I have a new requirement.”

For enterprises, the focus is on the “manning” problem: “It’s like an enormous management burden for them and so they want to simplify that and have a single place where they manage all those entitlements.”

The Vision That Unifies Both Tracks

Aserto’s long-term vision encompasses both segments: “Our vision is to basically be the enterprise control plane for authorization in the age of SaaS and Cloud.” Success means reaching a point where “no one is confused about authorization as something that they have to go build on their own. In fact, they don’t want to because that means that their application is going to be a snowflake.”

For technical founders considering multi-segment strategies, Aserto’s approach offers valuable lessons. Rather than diluting your focus, look for ways your core technology solves different manifestations of the same fundamental problem. Then build your GTM strategy around the specific pain points and buying patterns of each segment while working toward standards that benefit both.

The key is maintaining focus on the core problem while adapting your approach for each segment’s specific needs and buying patterns. Sometimes the biggest opportunity lies not in choosing between markets, but in finding ways to serve both effectively.