PushInterview 02
The journey of how a solo tech founder, Arvind, cracked sales and grew his client base at Infosec Future.
India is world’s fastest growing startup ecosystem where 3–4 new firms are born everyday. We have grown significantly in the past five years and are expected to grow 10–12% YOY for the next five years till 2020.
This boom has also led to the evolution of many service-based companies catering to the requirements of the startups.
There are around 9k Indian companies on AngelList with the “Service” tag**.** (Its shocking right?)
Credits: AngelList
On top of this, you will find every second person calling him a freelancer these days. (The power of social media)
It has become very difficult for a company to differentiate and standout in this highly competitive marketplace.
Read through this interview to know:
“How Arvind found his niche, differentiated in the marketplace and cracked sales being from a technical background.”
This is the second interview of the series “PushInterview: Interviews that helps you Pushstart” powered by Pushstart.
Check out our first interview “How I built one of the most active startup community of India” if you missed it out.
How I built one of the most active startup community of India
Who are you?
My name is Dr. Arvind K. Singh, and I am an information security researcher, speaker, and consultant.
I did masters in Computer Science from IIT-Patna and pursued Ph.D. in Information Assurance and Security from Colorado Technical University-USA.
From the past 3 months, I have been working on building Infosec Future Pvt Ltd — a company providing complete cybersecurity services specifically designed for startups and SMEs.
Since our launch in August 2017, we’ve grown our client base from zero to thirty.
2. What’s the deal with Infosec Future?
Well, the deal is in its name. The most valuable asset at present is “Information”. It is the information, which holds our future.
Information stored in digital form, is accessible from anywhere in this world just by the click of a button. It is its security which matters the most to secure our future.
We, at Infosec Future, are trying to secure the future of our society, by securing information.
Our services include annual security audits, penetration testing, threat modeling, readiness awareness, application testing, software development life cycle security integration, security code review, and more.
3. What motivated you to start Infosec Future?
When I came back to India in March 2017, I was astonished by the scale at which data and processes were getting digitized. Digital India, a mission started in the year 2015, had turned into a revolution.
But no one was aware of the threat it possessed. The threat to information security.
A few months back, Aadhar card (unique and universal identity card for the citizens of India) data was hacked by a person in less than 6 hours.
Hacker Shows Bengaluru Police How He Managed To Access Aadhaar Data
Our whole economy can be shutdown, just at the click of a button, from practically anywhere in this world.
Two factors which play a vital role:
- Lack of awareness and resources.
- The high cost of security.
Being an entrepreneur myself, (I started a company called CyberInjection in the USA in Nov-2014, which was later acquired by Federal Government in mid-2016), I knew that startups are always tight on their budget.
With this domain being untouched by the leaders in cyber security, I saw an opportunity here to provide affordable cyber security. And this is how, the journey of Infosec Future Began.
4. What all went into building the MVP?
“Idea validation is the most important step in a service-based startup where MVP is the founder.”
For the month of May and June, I was out there meeting entrepreneurs, discussing about their startups, trying to figure out:
- What challenges are they facing in terms of information security?
- How are they handling it currently?
- What are their future plans?
I would tell them about my idea and offer my experience and expertise. I personally went to 13 meet-ups, in 7 cities, and met hundreds of Entrepreneurs.
Meeting and interacting with entrepreneurs greatly helped me identify the core problem and develop an enormous amount of market insights. Some of them were:
- Almost one-tenth of the entrepreneurs I met, had already faced attacks or have been a victim of hacking in the past.
- Half of them were completely aware of the risk but couldn’t proceed due to the high cost.
- While rest of them were not even aware.
After processing the insights and doing my homework, it was time to validate my idea. So, I reached out to people, on LinkedIn and Facebook (I personally don’t use any other Social media platform except these two), and introduced them to my idea.
As I knew that startups are always tight on their budget and security is an ongoing process, I kept the offering to be low-cost subscription based.
I got such an overwhelming response from the community that I instantly registered Infosec Future. Getting Startup India recognition within 72 hours of registration further bolstered my belief.
This was when, I realized that we have built our MVP, and it was time to go live, go practical, and go after securing the startup ecosystem.
5. How did you get your initial clients and how did it grow?
I am a complete techie and I had no idea about sales and marketing when I was starting out. So, I took the most logical step of feeding on social channels to get the initial clients.
There are tons of startup communities out there on Facebook. Become part of them and connect with your target audience.
I would start the conversation by talking about their startup and giving ample amount of time to express themselves.
“People like talking about themselves, it is human psychology. Just give them what they like.”
And then, it was always the other person who would ask about me and my startup. Since I had patiently listened to their idea, they would happily give me time, and thus, none of my conversations went into vain.
We either ended up signing a MoU or becoming friends. Either way, my network was increasing day by day. I got the first few clients even when I didn’t have a proper website.
In September, when we started our operations as a team, this cold-reach out helped us get 10 clients in the very first month. By mid-October, we had on-boarded 20 clients.
The thing which has helped us grow rapidly is our unconventional approach of starting a two-way interaction and genuine conversations rather than up-selling.
The strategy we implemented was simple yet effective :
- Start the conversation by talking about their idea.
- Listen to them patiently and provide your valuable feedback. Tell them what you like about their initiative.
- Try to figure out the core problems that they are facing currently.
- Never sell directly, rather try educating them about the depth of the problem.
- And then offer your experience and expertise as the solution.
Some screenshots to make things more understandable:
How I usually start a conversation:
How I usually start a conversation
How I usually break the first barrier to a fruitful introduction:
How I usually break the first barrier of a fruitful introduction
“Do note that this strategy worked well for us because our product was unique, affordable and solved a core problem.”
6. What is your business model and how have you grown your revenue?
Our business model is similar to any other company catering in the service industry which is to deliver satisfactory services to the client in return for a monthly or annual fee.
We provide an annual subscription for our security packages targeting different segments in various industries.
Our package starts with securing a single website to a whole network of websites, which grants us the opportunity to work with a startup throughout their growth journey.
Growth in revenue till now has been largely dependent upon the growth in our client base.
“Our unique and affordable offering, core-problem solving service, and an unconventional approach to on-boarding clients have helped us in growing our client base and thus the revenue.”
How our revenue has grown in the last 3 months:
August: Rs 9000
September: Rs 27000
October: Rs 84000
7. What are your future goals and how do you plan to achieve them?
Our long-term goal is to secure data of every startup and SME of India and capture 50% of the market share in the next 5 years.
The immediate short-term goal is to secure data of 2000 Indian startups and SMEs by the end of 2018.
We have opted for balanced outbound and inbound strategy with upfront value to the market by quality content and free reports to achieve this.
Further on the product front, we are in the process of automating the complete process of the security audit, job allocation to teams, and report generation for various tests. Currently, this is in its prototype stage and will hopefully launch in the first quarter of 2018.
We are also building a free security audit tool, which will be embedded on our website, so that people can check the basic security details of their website, without even interacting with us. This will help us in capturing precise leads at scale.
Growing average revenue per client is also one of our major goals.
“For growing revenue especially in the service industry: It is all about maintaining healthy retention, as acquiring a new customer is comparatively costlier than retaining the current one.”
Therefore, to grow retention for Infosec Future, we have laid down a separate client servicing strategy which even includes remembering our clients’ birthday and we soon will be hiring relationship managers for the same.
8. The biggest challenges you have faced till now and how did you cope with them?
The first challenge I faced was to get a decent website developed for Infosec Future. I worked with two freelancers and an agency for three months, but nothing really kicked-off. I was not at all satisfied with their work.
In the end, I decided to work on my website. I designed a good looking website in just 2 days with the help of Wordpress.
“If you can’t find a person with the required skill, learn that skill and become that person.”
The biggest challenge I have faced till now is to onboard quality like-minded folks in my team. Sadly, the first three people I employed, left within the first month of joining. I coped with this challenge by hiring interns for every function of my company.
My background and profile have helped me in hiring interns from some of the top Business Schools in India. You will be shocked to know that I am currently working with 27 interns and it is somehow working out for me.
Team @ Infosec Future:
Team @ Infosec Future
9. What is your advice to Pushstarters starting out?
“Focus on giving rather than taking. Give all you have to offer to your clients, without expecting anything in return. Trust me, you won’t be disappointed.”
Don’t go around hunting for clients, rather build a strong network of friends.
Innovation is about “How you do things rather than What you do”. Being an entrepreneur, you are the biggest innovation. Believe in yourself, things will fall into place eventually.
10. How can we reach out to you?
You can visit infosecfuture.com to learn more about us.
Connect with me on LinkedIn, Facebook, Email or Skype if you want to geek out about startups.