👎 Thinking your messaging is “80% done.”
If I had a dollar for every founder who told me their brand & messaging are “almost there,” only for us to discover they need a full positioning exercise, I’d be sipping prosecco in my Italian villa instead of writing this post. 🍹
The 80-20 rule is brutal here. That last 20% is the difference between “we do AI security stuff” and a story that makes a CISO stop scrolling. Everything you build sits on top of your positioning. If it’s not locked, nothing else works.
👎Launching at the conference.
This is the most common one. “We’ll launch at Black Hat!”
No. Black Hat is hundreds of vendors screaming into the same room, and you won’t rise above the noise. Launch before so you show up with momentum that the conference will amplify.
👎Thinking you can wing it.
You only get to launch out of stealth once. There are a thousand details and a ruthless timeline. PR agencies need at least two weeks to pitch reporters. Your new website takes weeks to get indexed by Google. Did you account for US and Israeli holidays? Summer Fridays? Reporters on vacation on July 4th? One missed dependency and the whole thing slides.
You need people who’ve done this before and can guide you confidently to the best results using their 10-tab, 178-lines project plan spreadsheet. 🤓
👎Not having a marketing team and thinking the founders can handle it (“We’ll just use Claude!”).
Sure, if you want a second full-time job for two months. And even then, you’ll miss things. Founders should be the face of the launch, not the ones writing website copy at midnight, chasing customers for testimonial quotes, and coordinating PR embargoes.
The best launches we’ve done are when founders focus on being the story and let the marketing team handle everything else.
👎Treating launch day as the finish line.
Launching out of stealth is like planning a wedding: all the excitement builds to one big day, but real life begins afterwards.💍
The press fades. The LinkedIn spike settles. If you don’t have demand gen infrastructure, a content engine, pre-booked meetings at Black Hat, and a sales team armed with fresh collateral, you’ll waste the best window you’ll ever have.
We just published the full story of how Blue Seedling took Novee Security from stealth to launch in five weeks, with Day 1 pipeline and press in Forbes and the Wall Street Journal – just in time for RSAC.
Want to get this right the first time? Watch the recording of our webinar, Kill It at Black Hat: The 2026 Cybersecurity Marketing Playbook — watch here.
