Your local lurker has popped by to say Hi!

Introductions
#1

Hi all,

I’m Graham, and I’ve been a long time lurker on the bootstrapped.fm discussion boards now, trying to answer some of my own questions before posting, or simply checking out other peoples thoughts and ideas whilst I come up with my own.

Push come to shove, and I thought I would finally sign-up and give back to the community (and to hopefully pick your brains along the way, whilst I build my own startup!). So, here I am, a UK based security specialist, working on a little side project in the security field. I’m looking to release it shortly, but as always, any comments or critiques would be welcome! You can see my idea here: breachcanary.com

Breach Canary is a service which will allow you to be alerted as soon as it thinks your business may have had some of its customer information leaked. It does this via a number of means, but in a nutshell, each business will get its own unique canary to store alongside all it’s personal information, and as soon as that canary is touched or spotted on the Internet, you’ll know about it!

I am working on a number of integrations, as I know it will be key to target businesses of all shapes and sizes. Currently, I feel like it would be wise to target the technology-centric businesses, as they are most likely to be aware of the risks and horror stories involved with data breaches.

Before this post gets a bit too long, I’ll keep quiet and let you quiz me if you’d like to know more. Or better, if you’d be interested in becoming a tester/pilot user!

Kind regards,

Graham.

#2

Interesting idea.
I had that idea for SPAM about 12 years ago. You seed the internet with non-public, but findable “honeypot” email addresses. One you “inflitrate” the big mailing lists then any email coming to one of those email addresses is certainly spam.

Same technique paper mailing lists owners use when renting their lists (to prevent a customer from using the list twice w/o paying)

#3

How do potential customers solve this problem currently?
Is this a solution they’re willing to pay for?

#4

Two great questions - two that I would love to know the answer to :slight_smile:

I’m not aware of anyone who currently attempts to solve this problem, at least in an automated fashion that I’m working on. However, if anyone is doing this, either manually or otherwise, I would love to hear from you and how you have gone about it.

In regards to it being a solution someone is willing to pay for, this is something I unfortunately don’t have an answer to. I would love to say ‘of course! Everyone is worried about the risk of a breach, and wants to know about it before everyone else does’, but that perspective is from someone who is extremely biased and works in the industry already.
This side project started as a way of learning a new framework, but quickly grew legs when I wanted to make a complete product and see it through to completion.

#5

Sounds like a good idea.

I would reach out to a few companies you know are already proactively working on improving their security, and talk to them. It will be the old fashioned sales call/email, but it will tell you if people are willing to pay for this.

Good luck!

#6

Thanks Shantnu, this is the route I’ve taken so far and it’s proving fruitful - it’s nice to know I have a product people want!

Next steps are to update my lacking landing page and start getting this in front of more folks :slight_smile:

Graham