Seven growth playbooks from cybersecurity, fintech, and AI

Competition can seem daunting. These are seven approaches that companies used to understand their market and their competitors' weaknesses, and turn them into outsized results.

Cybersecurity

1. CrowdStrike — the power of transparency

The cybersecurity market moves fast. CISOs struggle to separate marketing from truth, and it takes months to validate any claim. Every vendor spends fortunes on advertising and high-end content, creating enormous noise.

CrowdStrike understood that security teams need detail — and detail is their core product. They see real attacks, in real time, across thousands of environments. Instead of keeping that intelligence locked inside the platform, they anonymised it and turned it into a content strategy. Their annual Global Threat Report became the document CISOs forwarded to their boards.

The result: instantly shareable content that cost almost nothing to distribute, built trust immediately, and quietly dispositioned every competitor's marketing claims. When you can show what is actually happening, everyone else's pitch decks look like guesswork.

2. Darktrace — the allure of secret knowledge

Darktrace came out of the UK's intelligence community — co-founded by people from GCHQ and MI5. Even the name sounds like something most people would not have access to. They leaned into that origin story hard, and it worked because it was not just credibility. It was the promise of hidden knowledge that the powerful have and you do not.

A CISO considering Darktrace could tell their board: "these are the people who built the systems that protect the country." That closes more deals than any product demo. Before they had a single enterprise customer, they had the most powerful trust signal in cybersecurity — the implication that they know things others cannot.

3. Wiz — built to spread

Wiz reached $100M ARR faster than any SaaS company in history. This is not really a marketing story. It is a positioning, pricing, and deep customer insight story — with the marketing communications built to make it fly.

The founders understood something simple: security engineers do not need approval to test security products. They can deploy them in their own environments, and if they find them useful, they share them. Wiz built the entire product around that insight — free to try, fast to deploy, immediately useful. Engineers connected it to their cloud and saw results in minutes. By the time the CISO got involved, twenty engineers were already using it. The purchase decision was not "should we buy this?" It was "should we stop paying for what everyone is already using?"

The community built itself. The pricing removed friction. The product did the selling. Marketing's job was to make sure the right people knew it existed — and then get out of the way.

4. Snyk — security for the everyone-is-a-coder generation

Snyk spotted something that is only becoming more obvious: the people writing the code are the people creating the vulnerabilities. And the number of people writing code is about to explode. They embedded security directly into the developer workflow — GitHub integrations, CLI tools, IDE plugins — meeting developers where they already work.

This was genuinely contrarian. The entire cybersecurity market was organised around selling to CISOs and security operations centres. Snyk embedded into the tools developers actually use, and that bet is getting bigger every day. When Claude Code is suggesting Snyk scans on every repo, and every AI coding assistant treats security scanning as a default step, the product sells itself to a generation of builders who never had a security team to begin with.

They pre-saged the "everyone is a coder" generation that is just getting started now. That is not a marketing insight. It is a market insight — and the company that sees it first wins.

Fintech

5. Wise — price transparency as brand

Wise (then TransferWise) turned their pricing page into their brand. The "Nothing to Hide" campaign was absurdly simple: show the real cost of sending money internationally, side-by-side with what banks charge. That's it. No complex messaging. No brand platform exercise. Just radical transparency about a thing everyone suspected but no one could prove.

Why this worked specifically in fintech: financial services runs on opacity. Banks make money precisely because consumers can't easily see the fees. Wise made the hidden visible. In any sector where incumbents profit from complexity, the company that makes things simple wins the narrative. It's not a generic content strategy — it's a structural advantage turned into marketing.

What's replicable: find the thing your sector hides. Then show it. Not as a PR stunt, but as a permanent feature of how you present yourself. Wise didn't run the transparency campaign once. They built their entire brand identity around it. That kind of commitment is what makes it credible.

6. Checkout.com — the power of silence

Checkout.com did no above-the-line communications for years. No newspaper coverage. No conference circuit. No thought leadership programme. Nothing. They built relationships with the largest merchants in the world — quietly — and emerged at a $40 billion valuation that took most of the market by surprise.

In payments, the buyer is a CFO or Head of Treasury. These people do not discover products through blog posts. They discover them through peer recommendations and direct conversations. Checkout.com invested in the relationships, not the funnel. The lesson is restraint. Not every company needs to be loud.

7. XTCC — building confidence in a market nobody trusted

AI

8. Anthropic — pragmatism disguised as caution

Anthropic entered a market where OpenAI had an absolute stranglehold on the consumer side. Instead of fighting that battle, they took the apparent weakness — arriving second — and turned it into a strength. They built for the enterprise. Claude Code drove massive token usage and began displacing parts of the software-as-a-service market entirely.

Was this luck or judgment? It was pragmatism. Win one battle at a time. Be right first. Use your own products to make better products. Engage with the community while taking a far-reaching, ethical approach. They said from the start that we need to be cautious with AI. Now we are in a multipolar world where everyone is racing, and they are making the bet that getting there first is the only way to keep it safe. Their growth trajectory has them earmarked for a trillion dollars in ARR by the end of next year.

Sometimes your weakness is your strength. Being the responsible player can lead to enormous long-term growth. Strategy and pragmatism are the same thing about ninety per cent of the time.

9. Mistral — European AI sovereignty

Mistral raised $415 million and reached a $2 billion valuation within months of launching. The product was good. But the positioning was better. They were the European AI champion — the answer to the question European governments, regulators, and enterprises were already asking: "Do we really want to depend on American AI companies for critical infrastructure?"

This is a geopolitical positioning play. It only works because the AI sector sits at the intersection of technology and national strategy in a way that, say, CRM software does not. Mistral didn't invent the European AI sovereignty narrative. They positioned themselves as its answer. The EU AI Act, data sovereignty concerns, GDPR — all of it worked in Mistral's favour because they'd anchored to it early.

What's replicable isn't the geopolitics. It's the technique of riding a regulatory or political wave that's already building. If your sector is about to get regulated, the company that positions as "the responsible option" before the regulation hits captures the market. You can't create these waves. But you can spot them early and surf them.

10. XTCC — combining an important market with orthogonal technology

XTCC took a market plagued by mistrust — carbon credits — and applied technology from an unrelated field (blockchain verification) to solve the one problem that was stopping institutional capital from entering: nobody could prove a credit had not been used twice. The old framing was "verification platform." The new framing was a predictable market where a true price could be found by buyers in an open, transparent way. Same technology, fundamentally different story. The result: $6B in sovereign wealth fund commitments, "Best Innovation" at COP28, and Financial Times coverage within 90 days.

What ties these together

Clarity of vision about what the customer actually wants, compared to what the market is actually doing. Not what you think they are doing. Zigging when everyone else zags, and doing so in a way that feels inevitable.

CrowdStrike showed what was true when everyone else was claiming. Darktrace offered knowledge that only the powerful had. Wiz removed every barrier between the product and the user. Anthropic built for the enterprise while everyone else chased the consumer. XTCC created a market that did not exist by making something predictable that had never been predictable before.

If you are at Series B and your marketing strategy could work in any sector, it is probably not working in yours.