Shining a spotlight on startup solutions with speedy market entry

Gartner defines a go-to-market (GTM) strategy as one that meticulously outlines how a company connects with customers and provides its products and services. This strategy focuses on smart tactics, intelligent buyer journeys, and the effective use of technology. An agile and capable GTM framework enables your startup to build on the foundations of your original idea to create a stable and functional organization that is capable of sustainable growth. In short, a robust GTM strategy can give your startup a serious advantage over competitors.

Here we showcase three winners in the GTM Innovator category of the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Startups Awards. These super-charged startups have won customers and secured partnerships through leveraging AWS programs. They’ve also adapted AWS technology and tools to suit their specific needs, and created solutions and platforms to transform how they interact with consumers and enterprises.

Read on to hear more about why we chose Gold medal winner Snyk, Silver medalist Qudini and Bronze medal winner Global Processing Services (GPS) and why each brings something unique to the digital table.

Snyk meets developers where they are

Boston-based cyber security unicorn Snyk is a high-growth startup that has differentiated itself as a GTM innovator by finding new points of entry into target enterprises, using a combination of freemium product and carefully targeted content and SEO. They saw a 2.5x increase in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2021 and launched their full developer security platform in the same year.

They used this growth as an opportunity to further their product offering and drive competencies and accreditations, achieving the AWS Security Competency Award, signing a multi-year Amazon Web Services Enterprise Discount Program (EDP), launching two native integrations in the console (AWS CodePipeline and Amazon Inspector), and doubling AWS Marketplace revenue every quarter.

For their GTM strategy, Snyk took an innovative approach to application security. Their developers form a core part of the security solution, so they’re able to develop securely without losing agility or speed. To achieve this, Snyk developed several AWS integrations across the application stack. This way, developers can take advantage of Snyk’s automated security controls from wherever they’re working—from the integrated development environment (IDE) to source control tooling to continuous integration and delivery (CI/CD) pipelines. “We are the only security vendor to have built a first-party integration into CodePipeline so users can scan their open source files for security risks without leaving the AWS console,” says David Lugo, senior manager of partner marketing at Snyk. “This drastically reduces mean-time-to-fix and improves security and agility.”

To further its GTM strategy, Snyk aimed to make it easier for application security and engineering professionals to find and deploy its security solution by offering its tools on AWS Marketplace. Snyk also partnered with Tackle and its cloud marketplace platform, built on AWS Lambda, to provide a zero-engineering approach to listing, integrating, and managing everything the Snyk team needs to sell successfully. This is a key element of Synk’s GTM strategy: recognizing security isn’t just for security teams but also for developers, DevOps teams, and architects within an organization.

“Since we launched in the AWS Marketplace, we closed more than 80 deals in 2021 alone, leveraging both direct and private offers as well as Consulting Partner Private Offers (CPPO). Our revenue has grown dramatically as a result of these two partnerships—AWS and Tackle,” says David. “We also created a Snyk and AWS Developer Security Operations workshop and AWS Quick Start guides to help customers onboard faster with AWS and Snyk, specifically for those using Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (Amazon EKS).

How Qudini pivoted and won Silver

Qudini is a smart retail queue management system that allows organizations to drive sales and loyalty across stores and websites. The London-based company had established its position in the global queue management system market by 2020 but when the pandemic hit, it stepped up its game to offer a full “retail choreography” platform, which allows retailers to manage in store queues and offer appointments and event bookings. Its clients include Asda, Primark, and TK Maxx in the UK and Williams Sonoma, East West Bank, and Bass Pro Shops in the US. Qudini has raised £4.5 million (approximately $5.6 million) through seed and Series A funding and in 2021 saw a year-on-year growth of 106%.

“We are now built entirely on AWS, and this has allowed us to expand internationally. We can rapidly roll out services in different countries while still meeting local data requirements,” says Fraser Hardy, CTO and co-founder of Qudini. “We have a proven process to spin up new installations in any AWS Region required by any customer, with our fastest roll-out expanding a customer from zero stores to 500 in less than two months. This much-needed functionality has transformed our business. When we started out, it was a challenge to deliver our service in a country where we didn’t already have a presence.”

The system can now roll out into new Regions seamlessly, spinning up new installations on demand. Qudini has several customers with global branches that can use the solution across multiple Regions. Currently, Qudini has services in five Regions with a AWS usage of $45,000 per month and is working with the AWS partnership team to become an ISV Accelerate partner—Qudini has already shared more than 10 go-live projects and has more in the pipeline.

“We have a fully verified solution that has passed a foundational technical review in record time due to our previous work, and we are in the process of providing our service on AWS Marketplace,” says Fraser. “We hope to complete this process early in 2022 alongside our Retail Competency certification.”

“Use the tools provided to avoid reinventing the wheel and focus on delivering the value of your product,” says Fraser when asked what startups can do to build robust GTM strategies.

Bronze is awarded to Global Processing Services

GPS is a payment processing solution designed for the payment and Fintech sectors. The company has been in operation since 2007 and is committed to accelerating the delivery of better financial experiences globally.

“After a proven track record using AWS for development teams and building out our continuous integration and deployment solution, our IT team has further expanded our usage of the AWS product suite to meet the strategic global ambitions of our company,” says Hannah Taylor, head of marketing at GPS. “Our investment in automation and DevOps has accelerated our developer advocacy program, allowing our current and future customers to test and ‘try before you buy’ by building a comprehensive on-demand program.”

GPS worked closely with AWS to re-architect its platform to create a solution that’s agile and capable of meeting its strategic global ambitions and those of its customers. The company realized that in order to scale intelligently and achieve a competitive advantage, including its GTM strategy, it needed to establish a robust partnership with AWS built on mutual trust. The startup has now built a new GPS environment aligned with AWS best practices using AWS tooling. The first European cloud offering passed the stringent PCI-DSS AoC level 1 audit to operate in September 2021.

“Our fast growth global expansion wouldn’t be possible without AWS,” says Hannah. “We are continuing to expand our horizons using native AWS technologies such as Amazon API Gateway. We also use the AWS Marketplace to quickly implement solutions and maintain security confidence using trusted products such as Palo Alto Networks.”

GPS will continue to focus on further development with AWS using Amazon EKS and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for microservice roll-outs across the globe. In addition, the company plans to continue working closely with an AWS Lighthouse project to fulfill the needs for fully compliant PCI DSS Hardware Security Modules.

“The full AWS ecosystem allows us to construct what we need, when we need it,” concludes Taylor. “Without Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), we couldn’t operate. AWS Control Tower allows us to keep secure, and Amazon RDS allows us to quickly implement a new postgres with ease. Without things like AWS Transit Gateway, we wouldn’t be able to join secure components globally.”

Conclusion

The AWS Software Startup Awards recognizes innovative startups and entrepreneurs across several key categories, including Sustainability, Rocketship, Founder of the Year and Rising Star.