Welcome to this week’s edition of Cyber Motion, tailored for cybersecurity business leaders. In this newsletter, you’ll find practical strategies, cutting-edge insights, and fresh thinking designed to help your security-focused brand break through a crowded market. My goal is to equip you with the tools and ideas needed to thrive amid shifting threats, buyer skepticism, and evolving industry standards.
– Tobias
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THE BRIEF
I started outlining this week’s newsletter from the cramped confines of my middle seat on the airplane on my way to CyberMarketingCon 2025.
My travel day was supposed to have been light and breezy. Just a couple flights lasting a few hours in total. Instead, heavy fog in Atlanta turned it into a 12‑hour marathon of delays, gate changes, and cancelations. By the time I landed in Austin, I was already tired in the way only airport limbo can make you tired.
I still made it in time for the opening night gathering. And what struck me almost immediately was the energy in the room. Right off the bat I started meeting smart and seasoned pros in the space. And they were all very excited about what they do.
These are early notes from that first full day. Not a definitive recap, just the threads that stood out.
Early Note 1: Resilience Is About Standing Out, Not Hanging On
The opening keynote could have been yet another “do more with less” talk. It wasn’t. It was about what happens when the market, the board, and the algorithm all quietly push you toward sameness.
One line, which I’ve heard before in other contexts, hit me:
“When people hear hoof beats, they look for horses, not zebras. Be the zebra.”
This was a sharp reminder that resilience in this market is not just about staying alive. It is about becoming the one brand in your category that people would actually miss if you disappeared.
A few things that landed:
Trust comes from human stories, not clever taglines. The speaker offered a brutally practical test:
Does this sound like something a real person would say?
Would you say it in a crowded room?
Is your audience actually the main character here, or just a prop in your story?
Clarity beats volume. You can pour more content into a weak narrative, but it will not make the story easier to buy. In a room full of cyber marketers, you could feel the shared recognition that a lot of what we publish is high-effort noise.
Being the zebra is a choice. It shows up in which stories you tell, how honest you are about tradeoffs, and how willing you are to show the messy reality of how customers actually adopt and use your product.
If there was a Day 1 subtext, it sounded like this: most teams are not losing because they are underfunded. They are losing because they are indistinguishable when the stakes go up.
In that frame, resilience is not “clinging to budget for another year.” It is making yourself so specific, so useful, and so human that cutting you feels riskier than keeping you.
If you zoom out, “be the zebra” is not a brand exercise. It is a survival strategy. In a market where boards are nervous, buyers are tired, and categories are crowded, resilience and distinctiveness are the same problem wearing different clothes. The rest of the day kept reinforcing that: the teams who seem most likely to survive the next few years are the ones willing to be unmistakably themselves.
Early Note 2: Scaling When You Are Not the Big Fish
Later in the day, there was a session that, on paper, looked like a familiar startup story: launching a cybersecurity brand into an already saturated market.
The interesting part wasn’t the launch checklist. It was the bigger question underneath it: what does scaling look like when you are not the obvious choice and never will be the biggest logo on the slide?
When you strip away the names and the first‑30‑days details, a few principles emerge.
First, smaller teams cannot win by adding more noise. The incumbents already own volume—more budget, more surface area, more touch points. Challenger brands get a different advantage: they can be painfully clear about three things:
Who they are actually for
Which problem they are willing to be measured against
What makes them meaningfully different, not just marginally better
Second, scale as a non‑incumbent comes from stacking proof, not chasing one big moment. Instead of betting on the largest booth or the flashiest announcement, the pattern looks more like:
Tight, specific positioning that makes sense to one type of buyer
A fast path to first proof for that buyer
Relentless reuse of every proof asset—stories, quotes, metrics—as fuel for the next wave of conversations
The brands that seem to be breaking through are not the ones with the cleverest tagline. They are the ones who can quietly answer, over and over again: “Here’s the exact thing we fixed for people like you, and here’s what changed.”
Third, smaller teams have to treat story as a system, not a stunt:
Expecting the deck, the demo, and the website to evolve as they learn, not sit static for quarters at a time
Letting real conversations with buyers reshape the narrative, instead of insisting the original story was right
Being willing to throw out “good enough” messaging in favor of something sharper, even if it means redoing work
One line from that session captured the mindset:
“You need to be 15x better than the competition, not 15% better.”
In practice, that did not mean 15x more features. It meant being dramatically clearer about who you’re for, faster to first proof, more honest about tradeoffs, and better prepared in every conversation than the legacy vendor.
When you are not the big fish, scale does not come from shouting louder. It comes from being so focused, so prepared, and so consistent that you feel inevitable to the narrow slice of the market you’ve chosen.
Everyone else at the conference might remember the logos and the swag. The teams that will still be around in a few years are the ones quietly building that kind of inevitability.
Put together, Day 1 painted a fairly clear picture: resilience is not about clinging on, and growth as a smaller player is not about getting louder. Both are about earning the right to be the obvious choice for a specific group of buyers, even when you are not the biggest logo on the slide. Over the next couple of days, I am mostly interested in whether the rest of the program reinforces that story; or quietly contradicts it.
What I’m Paying Attention to Next
This is only Day 1. It would be dishonest to pretend I have a “state of the union” view of cyber marketing after a single track and a handful of sessions.
What I am watching over the next couple of days:
AI is everywhere but human centricity is still where it is at
How many early‑stage companies are choosing focus and preparation over big spend, and whether it is working for them in practice
A Simple Ask
If you’re reading this from your own version of a crowded market, I’d love to hear one thing:
What is the most resilient marketing motion you’ve seen this year? It could be yours or someone else’s.
Hit reply and tell me. I suspect the real patterns are living in those stories more than in any slide I saw today.
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