The Unconventional Path to Enterprise Sales: How Authzed Built a $10M ARR Business Without Traditional Outbound

Most SaaS companies chase enterprise deals with armies of SDRs and aggressive outbound campaigns. Jacob Moshenko took the opposite approach with Authzed, and it's working.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Jacob Moshenko, CEO and Co-founder of Authzed, shared how his company scaled from zero to 25 enterprise customers by building everything around SpiceDB, their open-source authorization system. The strategy defied conventional wisdom: no cold outreach, no traditional sales team, and a stubborn refusal to compromise on product complexity for the sake of easier sales.

The Post-Acquisition Pivot

Jake's path to Authzed began with Quay, a container registry company he co-founded that was eventually acquired by CoreOS, which was then acquired by Red Hat. During his time at Red Hat working on OpenShift, Jake observed a critical gap in the market. "I started to realize that there was this massive opportunity to build the authorization system that was always the second or third thing that every engineering organization I was working with would build," he explained.

The insight was deceptively simple: every company was rebuilding the same authorization infrastructure from scratch. As Jake noted, "They would build the thing, and then about three or four years later, they would realize they needed to rebuild it again because they made some assumptions that weren't true."

This pattern of repeated rebuilding became the foundation for Authzed's value proposition. But recognizing a problem and building a successful GTM motion around it are entirely different challenges.

The Developer-First GTM Motion

From day one, Authzed committed to a developer-first approach that prioritized open source and community building over traditional enterprise sales tactics. Jake's reasoning was pragmatic: "We don't do any outbound whatsoever. We've tried it a couple of times and it really doesn't work for us at all."

Instead, the company invested heavily in SpiceDB, their open-source project. "We have something like 4500 stars on GitHub now for our main open source product, SpiceDB," Jake shared. This wasn't vanity metrics—it was a deliberate strategy to build credibility and generate qualified inbound leads.

The approach created a natural filtering mechanism. By the time prospects reached out to Authzed, they had already invested time understanding the product, experimenting with the open-source version, and validating it internally. Jake described the typical journey: "They'll come and they'll find us through looking for authorization or looking for some kind of Google Zanzibar type thing. They'll download our open source project, they'll mess around with it for a little bit, and then they'll decide they need support or they need the SaaS version of it."

Embracing Product Complexity as a Moat

Perhaps the most contrarian element of Authzed's strategy was their willingness to maintain product complexity despite pressure to simplify. Jake was refreshingly candid about this: "I actually fundamentally disagree with that advice for what we're building. The problem that we're solving is one of the hardest problems in infrastructure."

This stance created friction in the sales process. As Jake admitted, "It's actually very, very difficult for us to get someone new into a call and have them understand what we do and why it's valuable in 30 minutes or less." But rather than dumb down the product, Authzed doubled down on education and long-term relationship building.

The complexity serves as both a challenge and a competitive advantage. Jake explained their ideal customer profile: "The people who really benefit most from our product are people who have already been burned once or twice trying to build something in house." These experienced buyers understood the value proposition immediately because they'd lived through the pain.

The Content and Community Strategy

To support their developer-first motion, Authzed invested heavily in educational content. Jake described their approach: "We've written a ton of blog posts. We've tried to generate as much content as we can. We speak at conferences, we try to go to meetups as much as possible."

The content strategy wasn't about generating massive traffic—it was about establishing authority with a specific audience. Jake noted that many of their customers discover them through search: "If you search for Google Zanzibar, which is the paper that kind of kicked all this stuff off, there's a good chance that we're on the first page of that."

This content-driven approach aligned perfectly with their no-outbound philosophy. Rather than interrupting developers with cold emails, Authzed positioned themselves where developers were already searching for solutions.

The Enterprise Transition Challenge

As Authzed grew, they faced a common scaling challenge: transitioning from product-led growth to enterprise sales. Jake was transparent about the difficulties: "It's been very painful to try to figure out what does that look like to bring on more of the sales assist type motion, especially when we haven't historically had one."

The company brought on their first true salesperson with enterprise experience, but the transition required more than just hiring. It demanded new processes, different customer interactions, and a shift in company culture. Jake described the learning curve: "We are all engineers. Nobody on the team actually has done this before."

Despite these challenges, the approach was yielding results. Authzed had grown to approximately 25 enterprise customers at the time of the interview, with an average contract value around $50,000 annually. More importantly, they maintained strong relationships with their customer base, with Jake noting: "The churn in the people we actually sell to is pretty much zero."

The Path Forward

Looking ahead, Jake outlined a measured expansion strategy. Rather than pursuing aggressive growth at all costs, Authzed focused on sustainable scaling within their core market. "I think by the end of this year, we'll get to about thirty people total," Jake shared, describing a deliberate approach to team building.

The company's vision extended beyond just selling software. Jake emphasized their commitment to the broader authorization ecosystem: "We built a language called the authorization language that other people are trying to adopt, even if they're not using our product."

This ecosystem play represented a long-term bet that standardization in authorization—similar to what happened with authentication through protocols like OAuth—would eventually create a larger market opportunity for everyone, including Authzed.

Lessons for Technical Founders

Authzed's journey offers several counterintuitive lessons for B2B technical founders. First, outbound doesn't work for every product—sometimes a patient, inbound-focused approach yields better results, especially for complex infrastructure products. Second, product complexity isn't always a liability; for the right customer segment, it can be a feature. Third, open source can be more than a marketing tactic—it can be the foundation of an entire GTM strategy.

Most importantly, Jake's experience demonstrates that building for developers requires playing by different rules. The traditional enterprise playbook—simplify the message, hire SDRs, optimize for quick wins—may not apply when your buyers are sophisticated engineers who value depth over simplicity and authenticity over polish.