Zero to Hundreds of Customers: Hyperproof’s Framework for Product-Market Fit in the Enterprise Space

Product-market fit in enterprise software isn’t just about building the right features—it’s about solving the right problems for the right customers. In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Hyperproof CEO Craig Unger shared how they turned a personal pain point into a fast-growing enterprise software company.

Starting with a Market Shift Craig’s journey to product-market fit began with a prescient observation about market dynamics. “One of the reasons I actually started the company was the Facebook Cambridge analytics, that whole debacle that happened back in 2018. And I’m like, look, the more tech that comes out, the more threat there is to our personal information, security, et cetera. This is just going to spiral.”

This insight proved accurate: “The number of compliance frameworks and regulatory agencies that are kind of issuing guidance has grown much faster than I would have expected when I started the company.”

Finding the Right Problem Rather than building another audit tool, Craig identified a deeper problem from his Microsoft experience. Managing authentication systems with “100 million unique users a month,” he faced an FTC audit where he “had to do these really very deep audits, very little tooling help or infrastructure and of course I was really just a product person at that time.”

This experience shaped Hyperproof’s approach: “Every workload at some point when it becomes important, serious and very high value will evolve out of a spreadsheet.” They weren’t just building better tools—they were reimagining how organizations approach compliance.

Identifying the Decision Maker A crucial element of finding product-market fit was targeting the right buyer. “About 75, 80% of the time we sell into the CISO,” Craig explains. “We might start with the CISO and they’ll route to the compliance manager or chief compliance officer or somebody with a compliance title.”

This focus reflected a market evolution: “A lot of compliance used to be done out of legal. We have some customers that are also in the legal department, but a lot of the tech compliance has migrated away over to the CISO team.”

The Customer Focus Framework Craig emphasizes the importance of customer selection: “There’s a natural tension between taking on all comers in the beginning because you want to make revenue. And then you may create obligations for yourself to support customers outside of your ICP that really isn’t helpful to you.”

Their solution? “Try to lock in on your key customer, one that you can keep and expand and do that as fast as possible. It’s probably better to grow revenue slightly slower in order to do that.”

Validating Product-Market Fit The results speak for themselves. Hyperproof has been “growing at least two x a year for a number of years” with “hundreds of customers, dozens of partners, great kind of CSAT folks.” They’re achieving “significant amount of expansion in our customer base every year” while maintaining strong customer satisfaction.

As Craig notes, if someone had offered him these results back in 2018, “I’d push the button 100% of the time. And meaning I think there’s a much greater likelihood of a poor outcome than a better outcome than we’ve had.”

For B2B founders, Hyperproof’s journey offers valuable lessons in finding enterprise product-market fit. Success comes not just from building great technology, but from deeply understanding market shifts, identifying the right decision makers, and maintaining strict discipline around customer focus. Sometimes the path to rapid growth starts with being willing to grow a bit slower at first.