Carving out a place for an AI-native product in a crowded market.

Cadents built CadentsIQ, an AI-native platform that finds what's reaching end of life and end of service across your network, IT, and cybersecurity infrastructure, then hands you a plan for what to update and when. One tool, three domains. Pre-revenue. Pre-investment. A Silicon Valley startup in the truest sense, with a founding team, a product, and a cybersecurity market so crowded a new name could disappear on arrival. I joined the executive team as CMO to figure out where Cadents fit and how to say it.

The CEO and I built the message together, starting from the only question that mattered: where does a lifecycle tool carve out its own ground between networking, IT, and security? Everything else came from the answer. The brand message became the pitch deck, and the pitch deck mattered more than anything else we made, because investors, partners, and the first customers all needed to hear the same story and believe it. There was no budget to fix a wrong story with spend.

The go-to-market was grassroots by design, and it ran on a content and digital strategy built around the message: where the company would show up and what proof it needed first. Investor decks and pitching alongside the founders. Networking events to get the company in front of the right people. A website, social, explainer videos, speaking opportunities for the CEO, award submissions. Every asset carried the same positioning, so the company sounded bigger and more settled than a startup at that stage has any right to.

This was the second AI-native product I've taken to market, and I was in the room when the first customer signed.