As a cybersecurity startup, when you’re ideating your product, what comes to your mind – the technical details that you want to include in it, or the conversations you have had with people who’d be interested in your product?
If the former is all you can think about, then no matter how technically strong your product is, your messaging will fail to attract anyone.
Cybersecurity startup founders and business owners face this dilemma every day. Heavily focused on the product, but who are they solving it for?
Do you know that one person who will listen to your pitch and think – “This is it. This is what I was looking for.”?
Can you really pinpoint what’s the professional profile of that person? Or are you only able to pick out profiles in a vague manner, but nothing specific.
If not, your startup/business has what we in marketing call “the ICP problem”.
Your Ideal Customer Profile or the ICP isn’t all security analysts, or all CISOs, or all network engineers, but ideally a specific subsection of it or multiple smaller subsections.
Let’s say you’re targetting network security, then your ICP could be “senior network security engineers at mid-sized SaaS companies in regulated industries in region “X”, who are responsible for managing east-west traffic visibility across hybrid environments, and are tired of running four disconnected tools for it”.
The ICP problem is precisely that. To think that every relevant audience profile is your ICP.
What is an Ideal Customer Profile? It’s that one profile of customer or company which will get the most value out of your product and is most likely to become a loyal, profitable and long-term customer.
Choosing The Right ICP For a Cybersecurity Startup is Non-negotiable?
Let’s start with the common question: Does every business have just one ICP?
No. Your solution can serve multiple audiences depending on the use-case, and in some cases, you’ll need to tailor positioning to each.
But the mistake most cybersecurity founders make is assuming their product is relevant to anyone with “security” in their title. That’s where marketing starts to lose direction.
Your Ideal Customer Profile is not a static artifact; it’s the anchor for your messaging. It decides what pain you lead with, what examples you show, what words you avoid, which platforms you post on, and what tone you strike in outreach.
It defines who you’re building trust with. Without it, everything downstream – your website, your sales deck, your blogs, even your pricing, ends up built on assumptions. That’s how you end up attracting the wrong traffic, booking the wrong demos, and burning time on leads that were never a fit in the first place.
The way to arrive at that clarity is simple, but not shallow.
First, define your most important and repeatable use-cases.
Not every feature you’ve built – just the problems your product solves best.
Then, ask who feels these problems the most, and why. Go beyond the team or function. Look at role, context, urgency, existing tool fatigue, pressure from regulations, and even internal blockers.
Once you’ve mapped this, test it.
Use platforms like Telescope or LinkedIn Sales Navigator to pinpoint specific profiles.
Can you identify 200–500 people who match that definition?
Can you find overlap in their language, their pain points, and their buying patterns?
If yes, that’s your ICP – at least for now.
Use Cases That Lead You to the Right Cybersecurity ICP
You can also start by defining who not to target. That clarity itself will make your messaging and content far more structured, with language that aligns better to the reality of your audience.
The next step is to stop thinking in terms of features and start thinking in terms of use cases.
What does your product help someone actually do in their environment?
Not what it’s capable of doing, or what it might do in the future, but what it does today, clearly and repeatedly. The more honest you are about this, the sharper your ICP becomes.
For example, if you’ve built a platform for cloud misconfiguration detection, your use case isn’t “cloud security.” That’s a market.
A real use case is something like: helping DevOps teams in high-growth SaaS companies detect risky IAM permissions and misconfigured S3 buckets before code is pushed to production.
That immediately gives you a sense of the user, the workflow, the urgency, and the outcome.
Once you’ve written out 2–3 such use cases in clear, operational terms, you can begin to identify who faces these problems most often and who is responsible for solving them. Go deeper than job titles. Consider the company size, cloud environment, team structure, compliance maturity, and the internal pressures they’re likely facing.
A mid-stage startup preparing for a SOC 2 audit will approach cloud security very differently from a fintech enterprise with three siloed security teams. Your product may work for both – but your messaging cannot.
This is where most early-stage founders go too broad. They try to leave room for everyone, but in the process, speak to no one directly.
What you need is a short, specific definition of who benefits the most from what you’ve already built. And then test that.
Use platforms like Telescope or Sales Navigator to search for 100–300 real people who fit that profile. Can you find them? Are they active? Are they reachable? If not, you may need to sharpen either your use case or your definition of the customer.
At this stage, the goal isn’t to create a long list of personas.
It’s to identify one or two segments where your product fits cleanly into their workflow, solves an immediate problem, and delivers real value, without a long onboarding cycle or enterprise-level friction.
Real-World ICP Example: Our client with a VAPT automation Tool
Take our client, who just launched a VAPT automation platform for web applications. When we started working with the team, the initial idea was simple: any business that needs pentesting could use the product. But that positioning was too broad to be effective.
So, we zoomed into two specific use cases.
The first was small and mid-sized businesses (SMBs) that needed regular pentest reports for compliance – SOC 2, ISO 27001, PCI DSS, but lacked in-house security teams. These companies didn’t want red teaming. They wanted faster execution, clear remediation steps, and audit-ready reports.
That became the first ICP: compliance-driven SMBs with low internal security maturity and recurring pentest requirements. Based primarily in the
The second was MSSPs already offering vulnerability assessment services but struggling with tool fragmentation, manual testing, and inefficient reporting. They weren’t looking for another scanner. They wanted a scalable, multi-tenant platform that could simplify delivery across multiple clients.
That became the second ICP: MSSPs looking to automate and scale pentest delivery with a white-labeled solution.
The product didn’t change. But the messaging, pricing, and positioning did. One segment needed ease and compliance. The other needed scale and control.
And with that clarity, our client was no longer pitching to “any company that needs pentesting.”
It was speaking directly to two types of buyers – each with a problem the platform could solve better than anyone else.
This is how Digi-tx helps every client identify the right ICP for their business. That’s the first step to building a strong cybersecurity marketing foundation for your growth.
Final Thoughts
Knowing your ideal customer profile is as important as knowing how and when your product fails.
Most cybersecurity founders build a perfect product, and only then figure out how to sell it. But that’s a big mistake. If you want to sell early, think about the problem you’re solving before you get the product right.
After all, what good is a technically perfect product if it doesn’t fit the needs of the market.
