What it does
Cybersecurity
Canary provides an early warning system using honeypots - for $10k and 4 minutes of your time - you will know that you are being hacked and where - and you identify the hacker
The Product
Thinkst deploy security honeypots that allow customers to discover when they are breached (without them having to be informed by third parties some 300 days later).
The key - deployment and management needed to be dead-simple.
Honeypots have a long history in the security world (pre-dating Canary by decades), but were always painful to install and run. Removing this pain became their North Star.
What made the succeed
Kept promises
We were so crazily grateful for the early customers who took a chance on us, that all 5 of us worked like crazy to make sure we never dropped a promise. We are genuinely grateful for our customers and work hard to keep our promises is baked into everything we do and guides all our product decisions.
Being grateful to our customers guides all our decisions, so our sales will never be spammy, and our legal documents try hard to be in simple English and gotcha-free.
Connecting and collaborating
In 2017 we attended a bunch of evening functions and most were not really our scene. So in 2018, we rented a venueabout a kilometre from the madness for a little gathering of our own. While all the parties and bars were full and loud music was making sure nobody could hear anybody else, we had a quiet location where we bought drinks and pizza as Halvar Flake spoke about his experiences selling his first company to Google.
In 2019 we had the same deal with Jon Oberheide talking about how they scaled and sold Duo Security to Cisco.
A nice place to work
The rush to market in our early days demanded long hours, but we’ve been able to grow our team over this time so we didn’t all have to be “on” constantly. Today, while still small by sprawling SV standards (we are 22 people all in) we get to work pretty normal hours. (It’s still totally normal to see people chatting on Slack in the wee hours of the morning, but this could just as easily be people commenting on recent NFT craziness as it is likely to be because of work.)
We get to focus on projects that reasonably stretch each other, we get to work on features we think are important, and we get a chance to ship stuff that doesn’t suck. (It’s a little bit surprising, but just committing to not sucking is surprisingly rare). Over time it means we get to build a team of smart people who enjoy what they do and enjoy how we do it.
Giving Back
One of our core values at Thinkst is that we can do well by doing good. We sit in South Africa which ranks first in the world for income inequality. Last year we were able to cover tuition & accommodation for 3 University students, and over the past 2 years have managed to donate over a million dollars to local charities. We have some cool plans to do a little more in this space, but we will save those announcements for after we have more of those runs on the board.
The Product, the product, the product
If there’s one take-away from this post for young startups, let it be this:
The product absolutely matters.
If you can combine a great product with a really low burn-rate you are in fantastic shape for the road ahead (that’s particularly true for entrepreneurs outside the Valley).
The secret sauce - passion about the product and the people
From day-1 we’ve focused relentlessly on making Canary better, easier to deploy and easier to manage. We constantly research and develop new Canarytokens that can be used to detect badness with high levels of certainty (for small deployment costs). As we’ve grown, we’ve been able to hire smarter people so we’ve been able to continually up our game, from the devices we ship to the infrastructure that makes it all possible.
What do you miss out when bootstrapping vs VC
- Great VCs make good sounding boards for problems you might be having (but great VCs are pretty rare). So founders need to find the right VC
- Press is easier to come by for funded startups, but we also don’t think that that sort of press is super helpful.
- VCs give you credibility and in some ways give you permission to act grown up.
- It almost certainly has benefits for exits.
Where to from here
For us, it’s absolutely business as usual. We know that we’re still judged by our next update. That all our previous customer interactions don't matter if we screw up the next one.
So we continue to work like hell keeping our promises, growing Canary by making even more customers happy.
An inspirational interview with Haroon Meer - a hacker made good!
Inspired from
https://blog.thinkst.com/2021/03/we-bootstrapped-to-11-million-in-arr.html?m=1
