Field note · August 2026

When the Market Sorts by Loudness, Vetting Is the Product.

The mid-market doesn't have a vendor shortage. It has a vendor signal problem. There are thousands of cybersecurity vendors. The mid-market company with 300 people, one part-time IT person, and an insurance-mandated deficiency list has no structural way to tell them apart. They see noise. The vendors all claim to fix the same problems. The buyer can't see which one actually does. So the market doesn't sort by quality — it sorts by who's loudest in their inbox.

Too many vendors, zero way to tell them apart. That's not a vendor problem. That's a vetting problem.

This is where the outsider gets it backwards. They assume the mid-market needs more choices. What they actually need is a counterparty who has already done the field work — who knows which MSSP actually owns their SOC, which compliance consultancy can deliver a Type II report on time, which vCISO understands the gap between "policy written" and "policy enforced."

The introduction is the shortcut. The vendor wins not because they're the loudest, but because they're vouched for by someone who's already sorted the signal from the noise.

— Aditya connects companies drowning in vendor options with the practitioners who've already vetted them.