Essential Marketing for Cyber Founders

Hi. All right. Super excited, super nervous to be here and speaking, honestly. So, if I look at you, do me a huge favor and smile as big as you can and go like this. That would be amazing. So, hi everyone. Uh, my name is Ga Whiter. I am CEO and co-founder of the Cyber Security Marketing Society. Um, I'm currently a bootstrap founder myself. This is a very interesting uh space to be in and um loving it though like honestly loving it. So co-founder and CEO of the cyber security marketing society. I'm an AWS crowdstrike NVIDIA cyber accelerator mentor in marketing. Um and just a heads up I learned this recently but the uh applications are open to join that

program for anyone who has a cyber security startup. Um I'm an adviser to early stage startups in marketing specifically. Um, I run an industry conference, Cyber Marketing Con, and Cyber CEO Summit, co-host of a podcast. Any founder here is invited to be on. We freaking love founders on our podcast. And um, it's on the Cyberwire Network, so it's a real podcast. Um, and we'll talk about podcasting later. And, uh, my experience has been mainly at in the LA for the last decade at cyber security startups, startups in particular, series A and lower. Um, and I have some experience in threat intelligence, anti-malware, general technology. Um, and like I said, have been majorly in-house at early stage companies, which

is my favorite place to be because it's fun and it's messy and it's crazy and things work and they don't. You guys get it. So, and then this is a marketing and budget focused session. So, just to get more setting of the stage here, um, my personal experience, I've managed marketing budgets of zero dollars, which is where I'll probably a lot of you are. Um, and then 180K, 600K, 1.2 two million and two million um and this all without headcount so just to set the stage um two more things I am from New Jersey originally so I talk very fast so if I need to slow down at all someone like raise your hand shout um and also the

second thing is I am very cheap and super invested in making my marketing budget and my marketing programs have ROI and good outcomes which is why I I think I was invited to talk here all right so right marketing marketing It's building trust with your buyer. It's understanding their problems. It's actually solving their problem. It's a compelling story as some you've heard some of our speakers in the entrepreneurship track talk about today. It's authenticity. It's creativity. It's brand. Right? Can everyone agree that this is all components of marketing and good marketing in particular? >> Okay. Thank you. Two people agree and everybody else is like, I I I want it to be lunch. Okay. Well, this is not what

this talk is about. Those are fundamental things. you must have in great marketing. Um, but this this session is actually about money. Yay, money. Okay, I hope this is um what you guys were expecting because I did write the talk description to be pretty clear that it's about money. Um, so my goals for this presentation for you is I want to provide context to you as founders, not as career marketers, but as founders. uh context and help you break through the what is good marketing, where should I spend my budget, how should I hire, what's good noise. Um so that you can make good decisions because some of you will not have a marketing team at this point in in your uh

company's career. Um you will or maybe you are the marketer as well as the salesperson as well as the dev team because you're the founder, right? That's how it is in the early early stages. And even when you start getting a little money, when you raise your $3 million uh seed round, there's not a lot of money for marketing. Um so you might still have to do it. Um or you have to make or you might have to make decisions with your money on marketing that need to be at least uh slightly dangerous and not completely uninformed. So I'm also going to talk about three actionable strategies. At the end of this, you guys let me know. This is supposed to be

super tactical. So is it too tactical? Are you like, whoa, I just need to freaking hire someone. Uh I want to hear at the end of the presentation what you guys think. But I'm going to talk about three actionable strategies for founder marketing. So uh it's building your founder brand. Super important. Uh super high ROI if you do it right. Um really cool. Also uh starting a podcast and don't side eye me. Starting a podcast. I I swear it's easy and it can be uh profitable. So starting a podcast for fun and profit um and events which is the big dog in the industry of cyber security. We're at an event. We're at Bides. You could sponsor Bides. You

could go in the hallway and sponsor a booth. Is it worth your time? Is it worth your money? Since I'm at Bides, I'm going to say yes. But other conferences, RSA, Black Hat, um vendor shows, AWS, uh Microsoft Ignite, and then the millions and millions of tiny small events that uh all of us here as vendors because cyber founders are vendors have to invest or have to choose to invest to put their money into like what is worth your time and your money and your effort. And also, I'm going to equip you with resources. If some of this is too tactical or you're completely over your head, I have templates. Um, so I did this for a

career, right? I was head of marketing at my last in-house role at a security startup that was acquired by Menllo um in February of this year. And um I have like resources for y'all too, just to so you can take this with it with you and work on it or throw it out or whatever. But I'm here to help and be a resource to you. So here's the agenda. Um we're going to go goals and assumptions. We're going to frame this presentation. Um, we're going to talk about expectations of early stage marketing, uh, and why it is hard and what you should expect from it and you shouldn't expect the world from it, but you should start doing it.

Um, we're going to talk about building and tester buyer buying assumptions. We're going to talk about free and cheap marketing, which um, I'll do a poll soon, but free and cheap marketing, who has zero dollars, you know, what can you do with that? And then with some budget. So, what can you do with like something around a 200K to a 500k budget? And, um, also then I'll go into those three strategies. and I'll try to leave time for Q&A, but honestly the deck is 80 slides long, which is my fault. And um uh we'll see how it goes. Okay, my assumptions here are that you have limited, all of you sitting here have a limited budget for marketing

somewhere between $0 and 500K. You're not a super well-known company. You're, you know, your mom knows you and your friends and YC and everything, but you're not known in the market. You're not Whiz, you're not Torque, you're not CrowdStrike, etc. Um you are doing things differently. you have something uh some sort of amazing upstart story, you're doing something cool, you're applying open source to CNAP, all of that sort of stuff. Um you're early stage, you are still potentially message testing, right? You're still figuring out what that story is and what resonates with the buyer and maybe even who is the buyer, like is it a security engineer, is it the CISO, are you selling to the developer, etc., etc. Um

I'm assuming you have a website. If you don't, we're not talking about how to build a website, but I could talk to you in the hallway about that. Um, and you want to get the most bang for your buck with your investment because you're early stage, you have limited funds and you need to make that money go long. So before we start, can I get temperature of the room? There's going to be a couple questions here. Who here's a founder and entrepreneur? Most of you. Is anyone here a marketer? Why are you in here? Oh, hey. Hi Mariana. Okay. Um, and is there any other? Okay. Nobody likes to be called other, but so sorry.

I should have reverted that. Um, for the founders, how what is the stage of your company? Are we say are we thinking early like a preede seed bootstrapped sta stage? >> Okay. Very early. Is anyone at series A one? Series A. Um, anyone at series BCD? Okay. Higher. Um, public host. I don't know why you'd be in here. It'd be kind of weird. Um, all right. Awesome. um experience in marketing from the room. I swear there's only one more poll unless I messed up my deck. Um so who has like literally no experience and has no clue about marketing at all and is coming in hoping that I can actually help them. Oh okay. One person. Everybody else is actually

two people. Okay. Everybody else should be at the front of the stage. Yes. I love it. Um and then my other question I want to ask is who here has like a marketing team? has people working at their company right now in the marketing department. Okay, just a few. All right, cool. Thank you. I'm not going to ask you your budget. This is the temperature of the room. Great. Okay, so in cyber, as we know, like the tech doesn't always win. In anything, in any startup, the tech doesn't always win. Sometimes it is the marketing and the go to market and everything, like Lucas was saying earlier today, like everyone has uh something to say about marketing and go

to market, right? Your investors will tell you stuff, your friends, your family, your grandma, other founders who have been successful 20 years ago. Uh marketers, you know, who work in other industries like oil and gas or regular SAS selling martekch, which is the easiest thing in the world to sell. Um and SAS tools that publish marketing playbooks uh as part of their own marketing schemes, as well as agencies with good SEO and random people who will tell you all about marketing in the cyber security industry. They're all right and they're all a little wrong. And that's what makes this industry and why marketing budgets in cyber get wasted so often. I will say it's nuanced.

Marketing in general as a concept in cyber is nuanced. Every answer I'm going to try to leave Q&A. Every single answer I'm going to say probably starts with some version of it depends because it really does depend. Um I don't personally believe in like playbooks. If people are selling you playbooks or selling you stuff like that, uh they're they're selling they're selling you. Uh there is no silver bullet in this industry, probably any industry, but this is the industry I know. Uh cyber marketing has unique challenges. You all are probably your buyer. Um so you guys know that y'all are hard to reach, incredibly skeptical, skep skeptical. Um the marketing that that works is trustbased. Uh strong brands uh play a

large role in successive companies. Um you don't want to be retargeted. You don't want people to uh triple triple hit your cell phone. Uh you don't want to get uh marketing emails. all of that and that creates a difficult environment for folks who are trying to actually market their security products and services to those people and yeah, you can waste a lot of money quickly and it's because of the difficult nature of reaching our buyer that the vendors that sell to me, me being the marketer at your company, right? Or your marketer at your company. Um there's this era, there's this illusion of like there's a black box around the security buyer. They're hard to reach and they are. But

that is why I have found that this industry has the most inflated spend of any that I've been in so far. Inflated spend and most expensive um programs that we have to run in order to reach these buyers because um the buyers are uh like I said a little harder to reach and the vendors know that. Okay. So your budget is precious. Like I said, I'm cheap. I've always worked at companies and viewed the budget as mine. And if I don't spend it well later, it gets taken away from me also. So whether it's your money or it's in the hands of I mean it's all your money or your investor's money or it's in the hands of

your marketing team right um what you should be doing with every decision is determining is this a good way to use my money on marketing. So some of the things that you'll have to probably come across uh as your as you or your marketing teams are thinking about this is like you know you'll be spending 20 grand to 50 grand on attending a conference uh or sponsoring a conference like what what is the way you can reduce the risk of just entirely losing that money? Um does targeting CISOs on LinkedIn actually reach CISOs? Is all [ __ ] you know is it all fake numbers? Um and does it cost 2,900 a lead uh like everybody else? like is

everyone's company spending this much money on LinkedIn and getting such a low ROI? Um what is ABM? Why does it cost a 60K SAS tool in order to do ABM? Right? These are all things that you've probably heard if you're um if you are trying to market your security product and it's like you know there's a lot of uh just like there's a lot of noise in the cyber industry, there's a lot of noise in marketing in the cyber industry. And it's also why this is my company. I'll explain what I actually do now. Um and this is why we started the cyber security marketing society. So, we are an ISAC for marketers in the

industry. We're a membersbased organization. We have more than 4,000 in-house marketers at 1,600 security and product services in our community. Um, we basically are a marketing intelligence sharing program. Uh, we started it because I was new to the industry and I was trying to buy a Gartner contract and it was like a hundred grand and I was like, "What the [ __ ] is this?" I'm sorry. Am I allowed to curse, Carrie? >> Yes. >> Thank you. I was like, "Why is this like a hundred grand?" And they were like very difficult to deal with. And so I started calling my friends who I met at vendor trade shows saying like hey are you spending 100 grand on Gartner like

as an early stage company? And we started to share this sort of intelligence with each other. Okay how much are you spending? What's the ROI? Is this agency any good? etc. So now we do all sorts of things. We do education, mentorship, networking. Um Carrie's a member of our community and we we exist to help marketers and companies market successfully in cyber security and we're not an agency to be very very clear. We also have a conference and then we also started the CEO society which you all can join. It's free anyway. So expectations of early stage marketing and um obviously it's to hit those marketing goals that have been talked about by the other people speaking

today. We want to build awareness and trust. Trust is really important in the industry. You want to educate the market if that's relevant. If you're like a category shaker, you know, you kind of have to do some education. Why should I care about X? Why should this be the way that we do X now that's different than the way we did it before? Um, you got to set your foundation, right? If you are hiring your first marketer or if you are working on this yourself, you need to know your messaging, your ICP, your story. Uh, and then this is what you use when you do your initial marketing to get feedback loops. You have to put a

message out there in order to get a response back in order to continuously refine until you have a very strong foundation on which all of your programs launch from. Um, you have to figure out who your buyer is, why they buy, you know, support any existing sales motions that exist, whether they're founderled or if you have like one salesperson, etc. or some outsourced or some freelancer contract sales folks. Um, to experiment and um, and also to uh, build up your like sort of machine because you can't have a machine until you have a foundation. Um, but you need to do all that stuff first in order to get there. Okay, so let's talk about Okay, first

off, actually, hold on. Is this good? Are we all like awake? Does this make sense? Am I talking too fast? Also, okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right, so I'm gonna like speed through this because it's not about the money, but it is about the foundation and it is something you're all going to need. And you probably you might already have it. Again, if you already have marketing team, I like trust that they're doing a great job and like understand this sort of stuff and are helping you do this, especially if you have product marketing at your company. Um, but building and testing your buyer assumptions is one of the

first things you could do. So um what like an overall foundation looks like is knowing who in what role at what type and size of company that has what problem is buying your product for what amount and why and why not others. So that is the journey of marketing early stage is trying to figure that out so that we can eventually scale with that information. Everyone's seen this. Who hasn't seen this actually? Okay. Okay, a few people, a few of you haven't seen this. Okay, this is the B2B buying journey by Gartner. This is my favorite slide. I put it in literally every presentation I possibly can. If I was officiating a wedding, I'd probably

put this in the presentation. It's like my favorite slide. This is the journey that buyers go through in buying software. Um, and it including security software too. Um, it's no longer a linear thing. There's a lot of um, uh, uh, you know, sorry, I told you guys I was nervous at the beginning of this. Uh, there's a lot of of moving through stages. There's a lot of people that you have to be in contact with on the buying team. It's not just like, hey, uh, someone um, you know, you you send a sales email, you book a demo, you have a PC, and boom, close one in 12 days, right? This takes the buying journey

takes a lot longer now than it ever has been because of the equalization and democratization of of of information on security products and tools and what people are buying um, in the sales process. So, and then you add the concept of the buying team to this, right? Who are you buying? Who are you selling to? You selling to this person? They go through this journey. Oh, look, there's another person. Oh, and surprise, now we have to talk to like they were saying before procurement. Now we have to do a security um questionnaire and oh the CFO wants to know because this is a million half dollar investment. So you have all these people that you're selling to especially

if you're selling to enterprise and it can be quite a lift for for a company. And then you're looking at the go to market motion too, right? Are you selling direct? Are you selling through partner? Are you doing a PLG motion? So anyway, the point of all that was and all those beautiful graphs that I made and the beautiful slides that I have is that that foundational marketing m um that is based on your educated assumptions about who those people are about how they buy about why they buy and about how why they want your product their problems etc is what we're going to base all of our like budgetary um stuff on. So, and if you have not

already, again, I'm kind of going through this part fast. If you have not already done your personas, like if I'm saying foundational documents, I kind of mean three things. One, personas, two, ICPS, and three, your messaging dock. Um, this is what you should be doing, right? Who are you selling to in a security company? And security companies are very or um in a company to the security department. Um, and those can be really um varied and different. So, try to lock this down. go through your past sales one uh sales ones um you know close ones uh try to see if there's patterns this will emerge over time but you have to start with something you

have to start with some assumption right this is I'll say one of the biggest I said scrum master you're like what is this slide um one of the biggest uh deals that we ever made at one of my last companies Fortune 100 company it was so cool uh came in inbound because uh from so scrum dev team, right? Came in inbound from the dev team um to our website and the original uh the title of the person who requested the demo was scrum master and that just blew us out of the water because before we were selling to hard to to um actual security titles. So sometimes things also um it's an illustration of things that can

change as you continue to put your product out in the market, right? You might uncover and identify new opportunities there. And I have a template for you. Um, just email me or you could get it. Uh, I think the deck's available to everybody afterwards. Um, and I'm doing great on time. Good job, Gianna. Thank you. Um, this template is available for anyone who wants or does not have um, a standardized messaging template ICP persona document. Um, you'll be able to get it uh, after this. You just send me an email or I could attach it to the deck. So, you have your foundation and now you can launch your marketing stuff, right? And to be clear,

just like really honing it in. Uh you don't need to have a perfect ICP and perfect messaging and perfect like you need to know who exactly you are contacting or who you're selling to exactly right. This will change. Um and there are things you can absolutely take your marketing budget and spend your money on while you don't know these. So you're like, "Okay, I know I have a a solution that solves a problem. I don't know exactly who's going to buy that problem. I have a good idea. That's fine. You could spend money. You can start going to market with that. And then there are things you should not be spending money on if you don't already.

If you don't have like an extremely good knowledge of what your go to market motion, who your buyer is, what problems they solve, where to reach them, etc. So, high level for early stage founders and this is from the community intelligence that we have um in the society. We have like hundreds of thousands of messages that run through our message board. It's Slack. It's a slack one through our slack um every single year talking about vendors, talking about things that work. Um high level what's working and what isn't. Um for early stage I would say that these things on the left are pretty great uh depending on how you execute on them. So events, content marketing, and building

a brand for the founder and that's exactly what I'm going to talk about in this presentation. What I would stay absolutely away from is high investment scale up tactics when you're not there yet, when you don't know exactly who your buyer is, unless you use it as part of a testing, but really you should have that. You as founder should not be doing that. No offense, I don't I I totally believe you could run LinkedIn campaigns very successfully. Uh but I would put that in the place or hand of someone who is a marketer by trade. Um, and don't get um, bamboozled by like PPC agencies, folks who are going to spend your money on your behalf in this early stage

without being very clear that they are industry experts there. I think every marketer in this room, which there's only three, so that's not a lot of uh of n there, but uh I think every market in this room has probably had this experience of investing in a program, investing in something, a vendor, a partner who uh has promised the world or promised, hey, you know, we mainly work with landscapers, but of course we could do SAS or hey, we mainly work with sales tech. Yeah, we worked for Salesforce and we worked for um uh Gong and stuff and we can work with you and then 180 grand later uh you realize that was a bad

investment. So be very careful. Everyone wants to take your money to be very clear. Everyone every agency will happily take your money. There's very few that DQ you like you will DQ customers. Um and so that's something that we absolutely advise against. And then content syndication, um, if you've heard of it, if you haven't, just stay away until you are later. Things that can or cannot work are one-on-one meeting makers, uh, cold outbound despite how icky it might feel on occasion, and also intent and signal based plays. But, um, that said, also there's nothing dead, and there are edge cases everywhere, and there also terrible ender, terrible vendors out there. Okay, small but mighty budgets.

Here we go. You're like, cheap. This is me. So, what is even possible on zero dollars to 500K, right? Zero dollars is not a lot. 500K is barely a lot. If you're really like marketing to the enterprise, uh trying to get your brand and your name out there, it is um it's like a lot for like a person, but it's not a lot for a company. And there are some things you could do. I'm gonna have a lot of bullet. I'm not going to read through all these bullets on all these slides, but I do have lists of options available for folks. So, there's a like there's actually an almost unlimited amount of things you could do with zero

dollars that would take up way too much of your time and energy. So, you'll have to pick something, which we'll get into later. Um, on Z, I would also put a few things in place that do cost a little bit, but should be your base marketing setup even before you start doing uh like any of this stuff on the lefth hand side. So, uh, you should have your foundational documentation in place. We talked about that. Kind of ad nauseium. I'm sure you're tired of me saying it. Uh, you should have a marketing automation platform, which could be really cheap. something like a HubSpot, something that is like a CRM, marketing automation platform mix so that you're

able to capture leads as they come in, capture data, track stuff, uh build sort of a database of in an of um contacts and future sales people, uh future prospects, future buyers in your database. Um and as well as help you do some sort of very light lift marketing, which is is like newsletters, you know, capture stuff on your website, etc., nurture streams. Um, you should have a brand of some kind. You should have a logo. Shouldn't just be like Times New Roman. This is my company, you know? Um, you should have some product materials, right? It could be simple. You could make them in Canva or PowerPoint. You could hire a designer on Fiverr to make

you some brand materials in your brand using your logo, using your colors, and start from there. But you should have something that you're able to email folks or have available for download that is PDF style and uh able for people to reference later that talks about your product and the problem you solve and why and has your contact information on it. You have a website and you should critically very critically have the ability to edit your own website on your own. Uh you should not have to spend hours and time and money on agency hours to edit your website. Choose a website that is easy to edit. have your have whoever develops your website build

components or blocks so that you can drag and drop your website. This will make your life so much easier and any marketing team you hires uh life so much easier at the end there. And then there's some key scrappy tools. So like brand templates built in Canva like I mentioned, any branding material, stuff like that. And so where do you choose to start? Because there's like on this list here there's like a lot of bullets. I didn't even read any of them because I'm going to read them slightly later. So where do you choose to start? That's pretty cool. Um, so you're going to strategically choose out of the plethora, out of the buffet of free

things you could do that are still marketing and still might have an ROI. You're going to strategically choose the best options for you based on your internal resources, right? Oh, that one spins too. I didn't even know that. That's great. So internal resources is not just about your money. It's not just the budget. That's obviously one of the biggest resources, but it's also about your team and it's also about you as a founder, right? So do you feel comfortable speaking in public? Would you be as nervous as I am up here or would you be like owning the room and willing to get on stage and willing to talk to folks and willing to fly to

conferences and speak on stage? Do you personally have any time to invest in this sort of marketing activity or would it be better for you to spend your very tiny budget on hiring a freelancer? Um, and I asked that because um as part of the AWS CrowdStrike NVIDIA, I'm sorry that's the name of the program. It's like very mouthy. Um, uh, you know, I was talking to one of my cohort, um, you know, my mentees, one of the the companies in the in the program, and I was going through them. They were asking about like demand genen, and it was like, great, like, all right, you raised like $8 million, right? How much do you

have like a marketing person yet? No. Okay. Uh, do you have time? Do you have time to put into marketing as the founder? And they were like, we have one hour a week. I was like, oh, okay. Well, let's like cut everything out of what I'm going to suggest you and just focus on you in the founder brand. So, do you have time? That's an important resource. Do you have salespeople? Are they good? That sounds very sassy. Um, do you have a marketing team? Do you have marketers? Are does the dev team, which this is like this is like an unlock. If any of you eventually hire like a threat research team, h that is a marketer's

dream. that is like that can do so much amazing work for your company. Um, as long as they also have time to talk to the media or help create reports and threat research for your company and do you have uh and like I said uh do does your developers if you don't have security researchers specifically on staff do your developers have time to work with you and these are things that can come out of that uh but you have to know what you have before you decide what to do basically. Okay. So what can you actually do with limited budgets? Here's what I would say. Um, I think zero dollar budget and we're going to go

over a few of these like tactically soon, don't worry. Um, founder le personal branding is a really good one. Um, webinars, LinkedIn lives, people poo poo them, but if you could do them really well, really cheap, really good. Uh, podcasts, being a guest on them, or starting your own, which I'm going to go over with you as well, public speaking, uh, starting a Substack. How many people have we now seen become security influencers based on the fact that they have shared their thoughts with people repeatedly once a week or once every other week for the last like year or so? Just simply like you could do something like a building in public sort of uh

content schedule for yourself as founders. People find that interesting. You guys are the underdogs. People love that. Um customer research uh sales outbound relationships uh community create and then creative gorilla stuff. And with something more, with something like a 200 to 500k budget, uh you could start hiring folks. You could start um getting uh PR freelancers in to start getting in whatever is left of earned media out there. Uh you could start putting some paids paid behind what is working with your free stuff. Um you could start sponsoring events. There's all sorts of things you could do. We're going to focus Oh, it did have the purple boxes up. We're going to focus on those in the purple boxes. And I also

have a budget template, FYI, because right so of um if you add 200 to 500K like what's the mix? That's another component, right? You're not going to spend 500k on just conferences. I hope you don't. That's weird. Um honestly, so uh if you had 500K, like where should you split your budget? I do also have templates for that. Um so feel free to reach out to me and I'm able to share. This is my budget that I literally use uh at every job I've been at. Um, and I'm going I have like fake numbers in there and you could take it and use it however you want. All right, finally we're gonna talk about something tactical. How's everyone

doing, by the way? >> Good. Okay, it's so quiet and I'm not used to this and I appreciate all of you listening to me. So, okay, finally. Finally, we're gonna actually talk about something that you could do. You could do today, you could do tomorrow, right? Let's talk about founder brand. Um, oh my gosh, founders. There's a reason some of us gravitate towards the the early stage. You guys might be like, h I hate this. I can't wait till we're IPOed. But I really love that uh early stage like journey and the early stage uh the story basically behind founders who are uh trying so hard to make something happen, to make something out of nothing, to

grow something, to build something, right? It's an incredibly compelling story and it's something that all of you as founders can lean into, right? You are the underdog. You're not Whiz. You're not Tor. Well, you're not Crowdstrike, you're not Microsoft. Like, you are the underdog. You are someone who is scrappy and growing and making something new, which is absolutely incredible. And that's a story that you guys can can absolutely capitalize on, right? Not just like my security solution is great, but like I am trying something. I'm building something. I'm putting my heart, soul, and guts into this. And it might not work out honestly for you know we all know that but um okay so becoming a known entity why also

should you work on your founder brand um so becoming a known entity which has now happened to me in a bit of a way in like the security marketing industry uh brings opportunities to you because you are known same as like when people think of caps they think of whiz because whiz is known um if they are think if people start thinking like oh who's a founder uh who's building in this space or oh this person really makes amazing content about this or I know you know that they're they're an expert on this specific technical uh area of cyber security that brings stuff to you. Um it brings you customers. It it makes it easier to get introductions from folks.

Uh it brings you referrals. It brings you investors. It brings you offers to acquire your company. Uh it can bring you awards speaking. You know, this is the sort of stuff that um once you have this like brand in place for yourself, stuff starts flowing to you. And I know this because I've lived it. Not to like toot my own horn, but like this is what happened to me basically is I've built a brand as a founder in security marketing. So, uh building a founder brand is, you know, it takes time. So, it's one of those resources. Do you have time? You don't need any budget. It takes time though. Um, so try something as simple as posting uh one to three

times a week on LinkedIn. Who here posts every week on LinkedIn? Okay, a few people. Awesome. But most of you did not. Most of you didn't raise your hands. It was like 40% raised their hands. If you're founding a company and having to get the message out there, you should be posting on LinkedIn or social platform of choice. So, I will say LinkedIn's a really good one since our buyers are there, CISOs are there, investors are there, media is there, like a lot of people are on LinkedIn, so it's pretty easy like post on LinkedIn. Um, you should be posting and it's really if you don't know what to post or what to say, I would lean into that story of

like you're a challenger. Not being offensive, but saying, "Hey, we're doing something different. We I noticed a problem in my own life as a uh you know as an engineer at Lyft or in my previous corporate role and I've noticed something and I'm here to make um this issue this problem that I had that a lot of other people who are in my space had I'm here to change it. Right? So you could do a challenger post. Um you could do uh learned experiences, uh personal story, and uh use the post types of like photo, graphic, video, long text posts. If you're specifically posting on LinkedIn, these are LinkedIn specific strategies. Um and if you don't know how

to write, well, you should know how to write a little bit since you're founding companies, but if you if you're not like a writer, if you're like, uh my thoughts are dumb. I don't know like how to put them into text so that people read it. Now we have all these AI tools. uh try and use those if you're stuck at, you know, and can't get over the hump of like, I don't know if this is good enough to post. If you're funny, it's a bonus also. So, another thing that literally nobody does, and I don't know why, is you can max out your connection requests every week. So, if you have LinkedIn Premium, you get a 100

connection requests every week. Send those out. Mine expire on Sunday. So, every Friday, I'm like, "Oh [ __ ] I got to send out all these connection requests." And I send them out. When you send out connection requests to folks, um, either they accept it or they don't, but what it does is it continues to grow your brand and continues to make you look better to other people when you connect to them later. I have like a first or second degree connection to like a lot of people in the cyber security industry. Now, I feel very comfortable reaching out to people on LinkedIn, feel very comfortable connecting with folks. I'm not afraid to connect with CISOs. I'm not afraid to

connect with anybody on LinkedIn and start conversations and they will look at my profile and see that we have 700 mutual connections. They'll be like, "Oh, okay." Click accept. It's an entry into the into it's a it's a doorway into relationships. Um, and your team should be doing this, too. Make your technical co-founder do it. Even if they don't like it, you know, they're like, "Ah, I hate LinkedIn." Just make them do it. Um, and this is free. And so literally I had um I had taken my Can you guys see? Yeah. So I had 17,000 followers like five months ago and now I have 19,000. And it's a combination of sending out those connection requests and also becoming

known in the industry. And it kind of creates this virtuous cycle being known, reaching out, doing it over and over again on a repeated basis. Even if you don't want to post, you could do connection requests. This costs $0 except for I use LinkedIn premium. If you don't have LinkedIn premium, it's not 100 a week. It's something like 40 or 50 connections a week. You don't have to pay. You could just do this on LinkedIn. Video posts. Okay. As a founder, so people people love I'm backing up. People love faces and voices. People absolutely love faces and voices. Why is podcasting so big? Why are we all on TikTok all day? Like, etc., etc. So,

there's a lot of really um there's a huge opportunity. I am connected with the LinkedIn like corporate team like we work with them because we want to get like hey what's the algorithm doing like from LinkedIn to tell to our marketers in our community so they are absolutely prioritizing video video. So if you feel comfortable being on camera again pointing back to those assets like are you comfortable speaking are you comfortable looking potentially like like dumb for a little bit on video as you get used to it. Um uh we I highly recommend for all founders in here who are trying to build their personal brand to um work to to post video of themselves talking about

it. Um here you can see a few I put some great I put some um options. So Shahar Ped uh CEO and founder of Terara Security they just raised 30 million. Um they came out of AWS uh the the accelerator and they really lean into like content creation founder content creation. they are everywhere and stuff is flowing to him because he is everywhere and he's posting and being vocal and being out there and meeting and connecting with people and putting his face out there too because his face is the company's face. Um Connor Swam uh he is at Finn security so you could see also like Shahar has a very high quality production uh studio. It's in

his office. He has a nice camera. He has someone who edits. Connor just did this I think in his house or in in an office or in a hotel room somewhere right from Finn security smaller company. Uh they still sell software. Um they sell to MSPs the software solutions for MSS MSPs and MSSPs to sell through to their customers. So still gets a lot of engagement gets his face invoice out there. You don't need a professional setup to do this. How am I on time? Oh, sorry. Okay. Um >> 15. Okay. I'm going to go faster. And then once you have uh once you have stuff that works on LinkedIn, then you could start putting money behind it. I

highly recommend thought leader ads. If you're going to spend a little bit of money on LinkedIn, if you're going to try something, absolutely highly recommend thought leadership ads. Um what it does is it takes your post and promotes you, not your company. Because we all want to promote our company. We want to get the brand out there. We do that. But on social media networks, people want to hear from you, the person, the founder, the face, and the voice of the company. And it just even if you're like, "Oh, I want to promote my brand." Like using thought leader ads and using you and the members of your team and and boosting those posts um

gets really high engagement and much better ROI than regular LinkedIn ads. So, and you could do this at like something like 2,000 a month. We at the society cheap broke right? Bootstrapped. We're profitable, but we're bootstrapped. So, I have a very um limited budget. So, we were doing 800 a month and being successful with getting and getting the results that we wanted from these ads. Okay. Okay. Start a podcast. I don't have any of you expecting me to say this. You all in here should start a podcast. It's not oversaturated. And that's why I said earlier, don't roll your eyes at me. It's not oversaturated. Here's why. It's because 90% of podcasts don't make it

past three episodes. So, there's like a massive graveyard of podcasts that never ever make it past three episodes. Um, of that of that the 10% that do make it past three episodes, 90% of those podcasts don't make it past episode 20. That's the there's a source. Pod News, I have no idea if it's reputable, but it matched my narrative. So, that's the source that I chose. Myself and Maria, my co-founder and my co-host of my podcast, we have been running this now for 184 days. 180 sorry 184 episodes which is three and a half years cuz we produce a podcast every single week and we've done it for the last three and one half years

and when I looked at that I went oh my god no wonder I'm so freaking tired all the time talking to people but hey here's what happens after three and a half years of producing this podcast which does not cost a lot of money people are coming like I said found a brand people are coming to us I am getting uh contacted to speak I'm getting contacted to be on other podcasts I'm getting contacted. People are are agencies, PR firms, uh like tier one PR firms are reaching out and being like, "Will you please have our your our CMO on your podcast? We love your podcast. What about my CEO? Will you have our VP of whatever on your

podcast?" This just flows through us. We barely ask for anyone to to be on our show anymore. Basically, we still do because we do also want to invite and curate the audience, like the guests on our show, but like we wouldn't have to basically. And also starting a podcast serves a dual purpose and and it's not cringey. Okay, so starting a p podcast means you get to talk to your customer like whenever you want. Starting a podcast means you can conduct research on air with your customer or your future customer. So it's a combination of marketing and ICP research and continual development and refinement of your messaging over time. So, uh, and it's also fun and it's also very flattering

because when you're messaging folks saying, "Hey, like I'm, you know, I started this really cool security solution that, you know, it displaces your current, you know, XDR or whatever you want to say about whatever your product is. It's an AI sock solution, right? And they're getting like a ton of of the same outreach from the 70 other founders who are working on an AI sock right now. Um, this cuts a little bit through the noise because not everybody starts a podcast because everybody thinks it's too much work and it's oversaturated and it's cringey and I'm telling you that it's not. Look at this. This is a real example. Henry Steele, he's a senior security engineer. He's at

Entara. That's a vendor, but he's a security engineer. Maybe he's in your ICP. He was complaining about something on LinkedIn. People love to complain on LinkedIn. You know, take advantage of that. Jump in. Be like, great, let's talk about it on my show. and you form a relationship and then you get to know these people and your circle of influence grows. And then here's the costs, right? And I'm realizing I'm running out of time very quickly. Here are the costs. Our podcast costs $100 to $150 an episode, right? That's to produce. That's to edit basically. Um the time that we now have is two to four hours a week. Um because we record uh we

try to record twice a week. Often we have to move stuff around. That's how life is. Um we publish 52 episodes a year, 52 weeks a year. And then we use a freelance producer to take the extra uh quality control lift off of our plate. Um, and I didn't add it as a resource, but if anyone wants to talk to me about how I built this, and it only cost us like somewhere between 10 to 14 grand a year, um, by doing this, feel free to reach out. Um, because it took a couple it took like a year to get the flow going really. And I learned a lot of lessons on how to like basically all we

do now myself and Maria is like go on the Riverside platform post our mics and then talk to people and everything else is automatic. It's really great. Um and then uh you know in terms of if you don't have a podcast set up already like here's the mic, here's the arm, here's the what the what the hosting and everything will cost. Okay. Events. Events. Events. Who here goes besides this conference? Who here goes to at least one cyber security event a year? Yeah, literally everybody. Like this is like this is not like do you know marketing and like half the people raise their hand. It's like yeah I go to bides like or I go to black

hat or I go to Defcon or I go to RSA or I go to my local I go to Corn Con. I have not been to Corn Con. I cannot wait to eventually have the time to go to Corn Con. So I am super and people you know when you talk to folks about events, oh it's a waste of money. Oh they're just giving out swag swag bag grabbers and blah blah blah. So, I actually take the opposite approach. I think events are [ __ ] awesome. Events are amazing. How where else can you afford to fly like a bunch of your prospects to a single location where you can like then like casually bump into

them at coffee and be like, "Hey, what do you think about this event?" Right? Oh, hi. My name is Rick and I blah blah blah. Right? You can't replicate that. Events are awesome and they can be done very well and they can be done cheap and they could be done for $2 million, right? If you want. So depends. So early stage budget, I highly recommend founders and a lot of you are already doing this, right? You came here. Uh walk around. Walking around marketing and sales is what we call it. I used to have to do this at my previous jobs, right? You go to a conference and you would just like walk around talk to

people like you're not you don't have a booth. You don't you're not speaking. You are walking around and you are talking to people because it's the healthcare security conference and everybody there is in healthcare and you sell to healthcare, right? Easy. So, uh, things you can do, stand near your competitions booth and see who their customers are and who's leaving and be like, "Hey," you know, uh, you can, uh, attend every side event at the event, which are networking focused usually, and people are willing to talk to you. You could pre-book meetings. Oh, I'm going, you know, sim similar to, um, hey, I'm going to be in Irving next tomorrow, you know, like, hey, I'm going

to be at RSA. Are you going to be there? Um, be outgoing and friendly resources. If you're not outgoing and friendly, that's okay, but maybe going to events is not as much for you. Um, have canned questions to ask if you're not a people person and you need a little bit of help there. Um, and I love events, too, because it's that instant feedback loop. That is, you know, you get that like, stop talking to me, you know, that very like, oh, I don't want to hear about your product. I don't want to hear about you. You're trying to sell me. you get that immediately and you can either understand that they're not your ICP,

not your fit, or maybe you suck at explaining who you are and what you do and maybe you're coming off too strong or maybe it just seems super salesy. So, I freaking love events and programmatize. Whether you pay a sponsorship or whether you just go to an event and walk around, programmatize your follow-up. Make it easy. Everybody goes to events, they collect a bunch of business cards or they connect with people on LinkedIn and then they never ever see that person again. They never follow up. They never send a message. They're like, "I'm going to do it on the plane." You never do. What are you doing on the plane? You're doing emails, but you're not emailing the people you just

met. So, make sure to can your messages. Make sure to connect with folks on LinkedIn uh instantly, immediately. Send those outreaches immediately, so you know where you met this person, why you met this person. You can mention if there was a follow-up. If they're a speaker, say, "Hey, thanks for speaking." If you didn't even attend their talk, you could say, "Hey, thanks for speaking." you know, make sure you do that actual work of making your event, all the relationships you've built portable and follow you after the event. And if someone was interested in your product, you should have booked a meeting right there. And if you didn't, well, if I worked for you, I'd be mad.

So, if you have some budget, right? So, now we're talking about money. Um, you could do this if you're Vanta when you're investing and and I'll I'll really try to speed it up. Uh, sorry Carrie and everybody in this audience. Um, so I used to work at a commercial real estate investment and development firm and we used to buy like property and build things on it. That was fun. It was not cyber security. But my boss used to say location, location, low basis, right? Location, location, low basis. Is it the right fit? Is it the right person? Is it the right ICP? And what's the price? Because there is a maximum amount of price I'm going to pay. Even

if all even if there's um, you know, a hundred Fortune 100 CESOs there, there's a max that we hit here. So, when you start with your event strategy, you're going to start with your event strategy with um with some money, right? You're finally saying, "Great, we're going to invest in actually boothing, sponsoring, speaking at an event." You want to choose carefully. And events have different goals, too. So, you want to make sure you have your strategy in place beforehand. You want to say, "Are we going to this so that we can get the name out there?" Because we're so young and new that nobody's ever heard of us and none of our outreach is hitting and

no one wants to talk to us because we look like we're scam artists because we're not a real company yet. Um, do you want to find investors? Right. A lot of investors go to events that have that early stage uh booth area. I'm talking about RSA, Black Hat in particular. They walk around, they look for for opportunities to uh meet with young companies. Are you going for lead genen? Hey, we have, you know, 20 grand and we know that uh that our healthcare uh that we sell to healthcare and the healthcare uh association is having a conference and there's an opportunity to have a booth and we sell to these people. That's lead genen. You get hot

conversations. you could get pipeline from that. Um, and then strengthening relationships too. If you're selling to through with the channel, uh, the channel um, sorry everybody if you're in the channel. Um, there are some things that you'll probably have to do partner events uh, with the channel. Um, and then eventually like user conferences as well as well as dinners. Like these are all relationship building activities and you have to pre-qualify also before you buy. So, um, just like agencies, I feel like event sales folks are just want to sell events. They want to sell booths. They're not going to disqualify you ever. They're not like they're not usually very sophisticated sort of sort of um consultative selling. They're

like, "We have a booth. Do you want it?" And you're like, "Maybe." And they're like, "It's 25 grand." So, you have to make sure that you uh pre-qualify before you buy any sort of event. Um, I have a bunch of questions that you can ask before you pay them money, right? To double check that this is the right ICP, this is the right persona, this is uh a good investment of your budget, of your money. Um, and I have five slides of that, so I'm going to quickly go through them by just swiping. Um, another thing, uh, like a shortcut to a highly targeted event, um, is co-arketing. So if you are doing event, you know, you're going to Falcon, um

there's parties around these large events. Uh RSA, Black Hat, etc. Uh you don't have the budget to spend on uh you know, having a booth there because RSA will run you 50 grand, Black Hat will run you more, right? Even on low levels when you count all the ancillary costs of having a space at these shows on the trade show floor. Um so what you could do is co-arket together. If you're in some sort of uh portfolio, if you have a venture firm, if you guys are invested in already, uh getting the portfolio companies together to co- uh go in on activities around the the outside of the event is very can be very effective.

If you're targeting a vertical, association is events are really good typically and also some of the ISACs are very affordable as well. Um I another one of our uh the AWS accelerator cohort they only sell to like oil and gas and energy and it's like huh easy. You just go to like the oil and gas shows and all of your audience is there. Um and then partner events. So partner events are amazing if you are able to be in a partner network. If you're part of like an ecosystem again like an AWS or a Microsoft Ignite or uh Microsoft already like one great thing those are usually pretty expensive I'll say but one great thing about the audiences there is that

they are pre-qualified instead of coming up to you and saying okay you're this what do you do then they get to come up to you and say hi like how do you integrate with X so it's an easier leadin uh to what your value proposition is um and I also have this uh strategy doc again like free like I'll send to everybody this is how I do my stuff Like I'm literally I was like what what would actually be useful to our founders like let me write down how I think and like how uh good event marketing uh should work. So uh because this is way too short of a time to go through every

aspect of marketing. Um so feel free to reach out again or um in the follow-up I I'll send you what what my strategy documents are so that you can use them at your company. All right. Yeah, this is probably you right now. Maybe it's like ah this seems insane. Um I so one other thing I can offer to you as a resource uh we happen to have intelligence on what is a good investment and what isn't and who specifically is a great vendor and who isn't right so when you're looking at like an agency partner or a PR firm or um if you're looking to hire someone right the cyber security marketing society has lists of folks that we have

gotten um basically reviews on for the last five years we have had we have five years worth of historical data on reviews of hey I have invested X dollars in this vendor partner event etc. I thought it was a good return on my investment or I thought it wasn't. So if you ever are looking for uh feedback on a specific vendor partner or a specific way to go to market uh send it my way happy to answer. We have recommendations and we have people to we have uh not people but we have uh you know what to be aware of. Um especially in the event world there's a lot of events that are you know so so um right so like here's

some examples people talk about what works and what doesn't we also conduct industry research that's available on our website so for example we do an ROI of RSA right we're spending literally some of our members spend like like something like $3 million to attend and exhibit at RSA like what do they get out of that is it worth their time um so we have this ROI of RSA report we'll be producing and launching the 2025 version soon. And we break it down by uh uh stage of company. So we'll actually break all of the data by like okay uh series A funded, series B funded, series C so that you can kind of see uh where

you compare if you were going to invest like compare against other folks in your seed stage and also in your marketing and brand maturity level um so that you can make better decisions. I want your feedback on this presentation. Please reach out to me if you want. You can join us at our cyber CEO summit and um questions and answers time. I think I have like two minutes. So yes. >> Yeah.

>> That is such a great question. So he was asking um it's incredibly noisy. Everyone's saying that there's AI that they're an AI security product. How do you break through this AI noise? Um, this is a a conversation that we have with the cohort a lot. Um, my recommendation is to say how your AI is different, right? It's an AI tool that does it does X, but there are 70 competitors that say they do X. Don't give away your secret sauce, but talk a little bit more about the how how you do it and how you're different compared to other AI solutions. Hi. >> Oh my god. So he was saying why does threat research matter? Yo, threat

research it's like it's threat research is like a vendorneutral like unlock for a company. So threat research is what security people actually want to read and consume. Yeah, Carrie's like nodding. She knows this too. Threat research uh gets you PR, gets you buzz, can get you into earned media. Um and threat research is new. So it's interesting and actually our industry is very driven by like um noise like news. It's like a news cycle related. Oh, there's a breach here, there's a breach there, there's a breach that even if you don't um participate in that sort of thing, it um if you have new threat research that has come out, you have something to talk about. Does

that make sense? >> Yeah. So it's different from thread intel you're talking >> I'm talking about you could take your thread intel and turn it into a research like public facing. Uh here's a vulnerability we found. Oh look, we we used our tlety of our pro of our products and we discovered X you know uh sort of uh activity. Yes is the answer. >> Yeah.

into threat research. Okay. So, you have threat research, but you don't have anyone to talk about it is what I'm hearing.

>> Oh, okay. That's tough. Um, I think you could take what you have and try to turn it into something. So, you might have a pro again like product telemety like oh like our our massive um uh intelligence that we got from all of our customers says this. I think that is a way to do threat research without having a threat researcher who's actively like researching exploits and vulnerabilities and coming up with like big news breaking things. Um, but you can use your product intel like your product intel is valuable. Like the stuff that your product sees is valuable and it's different than what everyone else sees too. And that's another thing. It can it

can hone your lens and hone your perspective as a company if that makes sense. Um, okay. I'm over I think I'm over time. So, thank you everybody. I will be here for the rest of the day. And that