A seed-stage case study: How Oneleet is proving itself fast

Ryan Law, Director of Content Marketing at Ahrefs, recently shared an analysis of the branded search growth of 2,700 software companies.

These are all companies that have seen HUGE increases in search volume for their brand name over the past 12 months.

With Google search changing a ton, the companies that are able to rank for branded search, are definitely doing something right.

So I was curious to look into the companies that made the top 10 list and I came across Oneleet, a seed-stage startup that provides a full-coverage cybersecurity platform.

They made #2 on the list, seeing a +76% brand search growth in the last year, with 600 searches per month today.

But the reason Oneleet stood out to me was that I quickly realized they’re doing a lot of the things I’ve been featuring in my case studies AKA the things I think make the biggest difference in marketing these days.

And the results show. Bryan Onel, along with his wife, have been able to grow their startup from zero to $7M ARR in 2 years.

Recently - they’ve also followed in the steps of Clay - bringing in a 10x growth hire.

Plus, Bryan also has a huge advantage on his side. He’s spent the past 10+ years helping companies become more secure by performing penetration tests.

When founders are the experts themselves and have lived through the same pain points their customers are up against, it makes for great storytelling and content opportunities.

I’ll walk through how Bryan has taken advantage of that, what’s been the engine to their growth, their unique approach to talking about competitors, and how they’ve been able to double down on word-of-mouth.

Let’s go.

The founder-led content arm

No surprise here that I’m showcasing another example of founder-led content! This is where founders need to be investing - but in a smart and intentional way. Bryan does just that. Specifically, he does 3 things really well:

1. Building in public
2. Competitor content
3. Educational content

I’ll go over each one.

Building in public: Bryan has definitely leaned into the building in public thing and it’s working. He doesn’t have a huge following (1K on Twitter, 6K on LinkedIn) but some of his posts have gotten a lot of traction.

In August, he posted 10 lessons on Twitter from Oneleet adding $520K in revenue in a single month - with just $2M in funding, that they basically never touched.

The thread went pretty viral with over 400 likes and 145K impressions.

But what I love about Bryan’s content is that he doesn’t just show highlight reels. He also shares super authentic takes like calling out a YC company for copying their exact playbook, new design updates to their website, and of course - the hard moments of building. Like in this post:

Or here, where he openly apologized for not being able to respond to messages:

Or here, where he shared a picture from their company offsite:

All of these posts give me a real sense of who Bryan is, his personality, his style, the things he believes in.

A lot of his approach here has to do with the fact that he doesn’t buy into this idea of founders needing to wear these formal, CEO hats. The moment they do that, they stop sounding like a human.

Bryan says things like they are. He talks about things he’s passionate about, without sounding like a B2B robot. This wins him points. Makes him more relatable. This is such an underrated skill to have in the world. People are so tired of B2B tech jargon.

Competitor content: Something else he and his team do is speak A LOT about competitors. As he puts it: “Slinging mud at competitors can backfire when you are just as bad. But when you're right, call them out, and do it very publicly.”

On Reddit the other day, he invited Vanta, their biggest competitor, to a demo-off:

Not only is he super transparent about how Vanta compares to Oneleet - he also offers a TON of free advice and sets himself up as a true advisor.

This goes back to him being his own ICP. He’s a security guy and he cares about real security. And because of that, he can create a lot of trust just by connecting on that principle.

Bryan describes it like this: “If you're solving a problem as much for yourself as for others, you'll be talking to peers. Don't try to convince them, but find common ground. Whatever concerns they express, have a chat about it and listen well.”

The cool thing to see is that Bryan ACTUALLY does this. You can see him offering tons of advice on Reddit and Twitter. This post is a perfect example of what I mean:

You can’t get more non-salesy than that. And that builds SO much trust.

Educational content: Beyond offering free advice, he’s also putting out plenty of ‘zero-click’ educational content. No click-bait, no offer, no promotion. Just helpful information. For example, last week he shared a 1 minute video on LinkedIn, part of an upcoming series called "things you should know about SOC 2".

Educational content right now is definitely being favored by LinkedIn and in general is something people are looking out for more of.

Bryan is really able to shine here because of his background and hands-on experience dealing with what a lot of early-stage founders are dealing with when it comes to compliance.

Growth strategies

Beyond the founder-led motion, there are a number of other growth strategies going on at Oneleet that I’m a big fan of:

1. A 10x growth hire
2. Community-led
3. Social proof

Let’s get into each one.

10x growth hire

While Oneleet’s hire of Koby Conrad is pretty new, it’s still worth mentioning here. Hiring people who have a very hands-on and proven track record, especially at early-stage companies, is a growth hack.

People who have built organic and paid growth channels from 0-100 are your unicorns. Koby even wrote a book about growth. He was the former Head of Growth at Rupa Health, a lab platform for doctors to order lab tests. He took the company from $20M to hundreds of millions in equity and scaled Rupa’s user acquisition by 4000% in 3.5 years. You can listen to the full story here.

TLDR: Thanks to Koby, Rupa was able to capture millions of dollars in paid traffic for free and organically.

Now, Koby is applying his experience to charge up Oneleet’s growth. For starters, he’s investing in the company blog, getting up 20+ blogs in his just 3 months at Oneleet.

I can tell Koby has a great eye for content. Starting with the approach he took at Rupa, which he describes as: Have people use AI to write the content, improve it using their expertise so it’s better than anything else, and layer in graphics and great design.

Those things right there are the key aspects of an effective content and SEO engine: Scale, expertise, design.

Community-led

Oneleet is a YC company. But what’s interesting about YC is that it’s the perfect growth channel for Oneleet because most early-stage startups need to go through the SOC 2 certification process.

Koby explains it like this: The SOC 2 report is so other people know you are secure. So when your org is selling into a company that cares about security, actually becoming secure can help you unlock a LOT more business.

The value is there.

The only thing Oneleet had to do was build up enough trust and credibility in the community. And they did that by doubling down on the true meaning of community.

As Bryan describes it, they went anywhere the SOC 2 convos were happening. Their goal? Be where everyone talks about compliance and give your honest opinion, get involved. Bryan did this just by having an alert set up any time someone mentioned competitors or SOC 2 in the YC community. Eventually they added in Twitter and Reddit as well, but that strategy was part of what helped place them as the #1 choice for compliance in the YC community.

So much business came out of that that they’ve only recently started spending on ads. Bryan shared on Cody Shneider’s podcast that those ads haven’t converted directly but they add a remarketing layer that keeps them top-of-mind for prospects.

Speaking of being top-of-mind, beyond showing up consistently, Bryan made sure to always be repeating their unique value prop and mission.

He wasn’t afraid to create a real culture around the fact that too many platforms claimed to help with compliance but were really just about ticking boxes.

They weren't helping businesses become secure—they were just pretending.

He stuck to his belief that Oneleet was built to be the solution that truly focuses on security, not just compliance theater.

This set them apart - especially given that Bryan had spent a DECADE as a penetration tester and security program manager. His frustration with the solutions out there made sense. His position didn’t feel based on show but on facts.

Plus, Bryan and team did something really smart which was owning the positioning of being anti "Security Theater" - a really unique phrase and idea to help cement their place in the world of security tech.

But still, they were untested and new. They would need to get social proof if they were going to see growth.

Social proof

Bryan’s marketing approach has always been to focus on just making a few people extremely happy. Even just 5 people who love your product - if you get them to go all out and share about it, you can see a ton of impact from that.

Oneleet started out with just a few reviews on the YC community, but slowly with every review they got, they got more and more validation to make it slightly less risky for the next person.

As a testament to that, all 7 testimonials they have on their homepage are all YC companies.

This might not sound like a lot, but getting that many testimonials as a seed-stage company is HUGE. And in the cyber-tech space… even more so.

Not to mention, going back to the founder-led motion, they back up the social proof on the website with the LinkedIn and Twitter motions that speak to the real and data-backed growth they’re seeing.

It creates a network effect. Testimonials on the website, reviews on YC, and revenue numbers on social - all create a web of social proof.

However, it all started by doubling down on just getting those first few customers. And making sure they were extremely happy.

How? Bryan attributes their happiness to never trying to sell but genuinely guiding prospects to the right solution for them. That resulted in customers then going and telling their peers about that positive experience. And in that way, the not-selling approach actually paid off in sales down the line.

Takeaways

Oneleet is still very early on but I’m super impressed with their growth so far and I’m excited to continue following their journey.

Oneleet is a reminder for me that:

1. Founders need to take a stance. This sounds like a simple thing but so many founders are afraid to do this. If you can’t be passionate about why your software should exist…why should your prospective customers care about it? You need someone within your company to be the face of your company. For Oneleet, Bryan is perfect because he has a strong POV! Don’t invest in founder-led content if you can’t get that POV.
2. SEO isn’t dead. It’s always nice to see brands winning the brand demand game. Oneleet proves that you don’t need to be a $100M funded company to be on the radar. They’re carving out organic demand for themselves and they’re doing it with a small, scrappy, and resourceful team.
3. Transparency and authenticity exist in B2B. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company tackle the competitor topic the way Oneleet does. B2B companies are so afraid to admit they’re not perfect. As marketers, we’re afraid to even just write like humans. I know that when I was in-house, there was so much pressure for the content to sound professional and polished, that it came at the cost of offering plain and simple advice.
4. Community matters. Bryan doubled down on the YC community. He knew it would take time to build that trust. It’s even harder in the cyber security space. But he was patient, willing to just listen, and not push the sell unless it was really right.
5. Companies should value every customer. Make them true fans. Do the most you can with every testimonial you get.

Go Oneleet!