Material Security · Go-to-market · Senior · 45 to 60 minutes

How should Material pick its first product?

Material Security is an enterprise security company that protects sensitive information inside email accounts, even after attackers get access. Answer this product management case and get it graded line by line against a weighted rubric.

Go-to-market strategy
Enterprise sales thinking
Discovery design
Prioritization
Decision-making under uncertainty

The situation

Material Security's founding team has agreed they want to build a B2B software company together, and they have already aligned on roles, equity, and the kind of company they want to create. After tracking 25 possible spaces, they have narrowed the list to four serious product ideas across security, people analytics, and other enterprise software areas. None of the ideas has an MVP, landing page, or full mockups. Two founders are preparing to leave stable jobs, so the team needs a credible way to choose one direction quickly without wasting months building the wrong thing. Ryan Noon asks you to recommend the validation and go-to-market approach for this decision point. Your plan needs to help the founders compare the four ideas fairly, learn which customer they should serve first, and decide what evidence is strong enough to commit engineering resources. The tension is that every idea looks plausible on paper, but polite customer feedback can mislead, enterprise buying cycles are noisy, and the team cannot afford to lose learning by chasing the wrong customer.

What to produce

Write a 2 page recommendation memo.

Your answer must

State your recommended validation strategy for the four ideas and explain why it is better than at least one alternative, such as customer interviews first or building MVPs first.
Define how you would segment target customers and buyer roles for each idea, and how you would keep learning comparable across ideas.
Lay out a step by step plan for the next two months, including outreach, meeting structure, pitch materials, follow up, and how the three founders should divide the work.
Specify the decision criteria you would use to pick one idea, including signals of real buyer pull, pricing confidence, and readiness to move from validation into build.
Identify the biggest risks, false signals, and second-order effects, including how your approach avoids wasting learning on the wrong customer or channel.

Constraints

No product demo, prototype, or landing page exists today.
The company wants to avoid spending time on polished assets for ideas that are not yet validated.
The business model is already constrained to B2B software.
Validation must work through founder-led selling rather than a hired sales team.

Format

Use clear headings and include a simple comparison table or scorecard for the four ideas.

How Material Security actually played it

Founders narrowed 25 startup ideas to four and used pre-selling without a demo to test each. A concrete method for choosing what to build.

Pre-sell to test demand before building
Narrow ideas with explicit criteria

Built from Material Security's Path to Product-Market Fit: Selling Products That Don't Exist Yet by First Round Review.