Competitors would simply alert clients to a security threat, leaving them to investigate. eSentire differentiated by handling the entire incident response: investigating the threat, kicking out the attacker, and providing an "all clear." This deeper service commitment was their key competitive advantage.

Faced with resource-heavy US competitors in the direct market, uSecure identified the Managed Service Provider (MSP) channel as an underserved green space. They executed a hard pivot, rebuilding their product and licensing specifically for MSPs, which created a key differentiator that fueled their growth.

Huntress succeeded with MSPs by framing its security product as a way to protect their margins. Since MSPs charge a flat fee, a security incident meant lost time and negative profit on a client. Huntress helped them avoid financial losses and become heroes to their customers, ensuring deep partnership alignment.

Harvey's initial product was a tool for individual lawyers. The company found greater value by shifting focus to the productivity of entire legal teams and firms, tackling enterprise-level challenges like workflow orchestration, governance, and secure collaboration, which go far beyond simple model intelligence.

Initial go-to-market efforts selling directly to small businesses failed because the buyers weren't technical. After five consecutive calls revealed that SMBs outsource their IT, founder Kyle Hanslovan realized he needed to sell to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) instead of the end-users.

Snyk saw low adoption when asking developers to add checks to their build process. The breakthrough was a GitHub app that not only flagged new vulnerabilities but proactively opened pull requests with the fix. This reframed the tool from a potential blocker to an indispensable, helpful assistant.

Astronomer's customers for their Clickstream product were more fascinated by its Airflow backend than the product's value proposition. This overwhelming interest validated their pivot to a managed Airflow service, revealing a hidden, more urgent market need.

Buildots' growth inflection happened when they stopped selling a data platform and started selling proactive risk alerts. The pitch changed from "Here's data to help you" to "If you don't fix this now, your project will fail." This simplified the value proposition and created urgency.

Snyk achieved developer adoption but failed to monetize until they addressed the needs of the actual buyer—the security team. They had to add governance and reporting features, realizing that user love doesn't automatically translate to sales when the user and buyer are different people.