“We ‘just’ put together a little blog post about the problem, and it went viral…” that’s how Tarun Desikan and his co-founders incubated Banyan Security. Now four years later, Banyan is a well founded A-round start up with real products, real customers and reaching real scale.
Tarun, who comes from the networking space, talks about selling fear, whether that’s a good thing or now, and how to get past the buzzword buzz.
“Zero Trust is a buzzword, but finding a marketing strategy that rises above fear and buzzword is a real problem all onto itself.”
Tarun talks about coming at it as a startup, what it’s like to compete with big guys like Palo Alto and others who have more marketers in their organization than you have in your whole organization.
Tarun talks about using the Zero Trust buzzword to both elevate their message and to level the playing field, getting ahead of problems, and timing the problem right. Tarun asks, “What’s the difference between a good product and one that is too early in the market? - Nothing!”
Tarun has a lot to say about ramping up marketing after early product market fit segmenting, reaching and targeting 3-types of CISOs, segmenting early customers, targeting and the like, and when to attack the install base category or focus more on a niche and leverage the buzz and how recommends “strong beliefs held lightly”.
Tarun recommends you check out Steven Denning’s The Leaders’s Guide to Storytelling as well as the Lost History of Byzantine and that you follow @SwiftOnSecurity and @RickRubin on Twitter
You can follow Tarun at all the usual places, on Twitter at @tdesikan as well as on LinkedIn and you can learn more about Banyan at https://www.banyansecurity.io.
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