Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Who was the first customer that adopted your solution?

Domingo Guerra: We had a lot of initial beta customers. Automotive companies were doing manual testing of apps, and we were helping them automate that. The first paying customer was one of the largest ad networks. When you play a game, for example, you might see a popup suggesting you to download another game. They wanted to make sure that those games didn’t have malware. It was before we had a user interface.

Now we serve the enterprise directly and we have a portal where they can go to. At that time, we only had our engines. It was very rudimentary. It was basically API access where we would grant the customer a way for them to upload or submit applications. Then our engines would review them and reply with a score and a report for the risk on those applications. It was at the very early stages of what our product is today. It was mainly the core of the engine. It allowed us to get some market feedback and to get some folks to actually use the product.

Sramana Mitra: When did you start this kind of a pivot?

Domingo Guerra: As most startups do, you tend to pitch or offer your product to anyone who will listen. We realized that we had an ad network. We had an app store. We have a very fragmented customer base. It was difficult to get feedback that was well-received across the board when your customers are so diverse.

We also saw that the enterprise, in general, was adopting Mobile Device Management to try and secure devices from an email perspective, but those technologies were not really addressing mobile risk from an application layer or from a software layer. We saw an opportunity to go in and partner with the MDMs that would provide the distribution for our technology and provide us with a list of enterprises that are already investing in mobility. That was in early 2013. At that point, we had already raised our Series A. We were ready to be in front of enterprises.

When we started getting close to the enterprise, we started getting way more feedback into the types of risks they were looking for and the way to address those risks. Our product started getting a lot better once we started getting feedback from our actual target market. As a result, we started getting more customers who were reference customers for others in the space, and we were able to collect feedback that would be useful to other enterprises. Even if they were in different verticals, they had the same types of overall risks or risk strategy.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Mobile Security Company in Silicon Valley: Domingo Guerra, Co-Founder and President of Appthority
1 2 3 4 5 6