Marketing at a security startup is both an exciting and lonely place to be. If you’ve worked for a large security vendor before, you’ve seen firsthand how many people – and how much budget – it takes to compete for awareness in this market.

But you usually don’t have any of that at a startup. What you do have is a bunch of well-intentioned colleagues with many ideas, many opinions, a bias towards action, and a general view that gaining marketing traction should be easy if you have a better product.

Pitching a formal positioning exercise at a startup can be tricky, particularly during the seed or Series A funding days. The reality is that you’re in survival mode at that point. Everyone is chasing the early customer wins you need to keep going and attract more funding.

But it’s also a time when positioning is more critical than ever. It will help you make the limited marketing dollars you have count. You also won’t be able to invent it over a weekend when it’s time to put the next fundraising deck together.

So if you don’t think your leadership team is ready to go all-in on a formal positioning project, incremental, week-by-week progress is better than punting positioning entirely.

Here’s a suggestion. Without even mentioning the word “positioning,” spend a week or two trying to drive leadership team consensus on these five questions:

1. Are we disrupting an existing category, addressing a piece of an existing category much better than current players, or attempting to create a new category?

2. What specific problems do we solve for security teams?

3. How are they trying to solve these problems today?

4. What isn’t working about that?

5. Are there any broader security industry trends we can “draft” on?

You might look at these questions and think, “we’re already aligned on these.” But you’re probably not. And until you are, your company doesn’t have the foundation it needs to succeed.

-Doug

Marketing at a security startup is both an exciting and lonely place to be. If you’ve worked for a large security vendor before, you’ve seen firsthand how many people – and how much budget – it takes to compete for awareness in this market.

But you usually don’t have any of that at a startup. What you do have is a bunch of well-intentioned colleagues with many ideas, many opinions, a bias towards action, and a general view that gaining marketing traction should be easy if you have a better product.

Pitching a formal positioning exercise at a startup can be tricky, particularly during the seed or Series A funding days. The reality is that you’re in survival mode at that point. Everyone is chasing the early customer wins you need to keep going and attract more funding.

But it’s also a time when positioning is more critical than ever. It will help you make the limited marketing dollars you have count. You also won’t be able to invent it over a weekend when it’s time to put the next fundraising deck together.

So if you don’t think your leadership team is ready to go all-in on a formal positioning project, incremental, week-by-week progress is better than punting positioning entirely.

Here’s a suggestion. Without even mentioning the word “positioning,” spend a week or two trying to drive leadership team consensus on these five questions:

1. Are we disrupting an existing category, addressing a piece of an existing category much better than current players, or attempting to create a new category?

2. What specific problems do we solve for security teams?

3. How are they trying to solve these problems today?

4. What isn’t working about that?

5. Are there any broader security industry trends we can “draft” on?

You might look at these questions and think, “we’re already aligned on these.” But you’re probably not. And until you are, your company doesn’t have the foundation it needs to succeed.

-Doug