A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You were open to all the vulnerabilities.

Aviram Jenik: Correct. That gave us the opportunity to do this security check for you. If your severs are out there in the Internet, we can also tell you if you’ve got all these problems. We started offering that as a remote. What’s funny about this is, this whole process was something that we stumbled into and we didn’t think was a big deal. We saw it as a temporary thing. We’re still selling that service today.

Sramana Mitra: Wow.

Aviram Jenik: At that time, we would never have imagined we would be selling these for 18 years. We wanted to figure out something better. We just grew and grew. 18 years later, it doesn’t even seem like we’re halfway through it.

Sramana Mitra: What were the financial outcomes at that point? How did you go to market?

Aviram Jenik: They’re really good questions. Pricing was one really good example. We struggled with it for years until we found that sweet spot. When you’re trying to figure out pricing, it’s like a tug of war between conflicted things. You want to give it at an affordable price, but you also want to charge more for customers that can pay more.

Sramana Mitra: The way the price is, we pick a segment where the primary customer is and price it to that segment’s price sensitivity.

Aviram Jenik: Sometimes. It’s usually not as simplistic as that.

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot more complexity in that process but it’s one of the factors that we determine pricing through.

Aviram Jenik: Right. There’s also a question of pricing it low and maybe acquire a lot of customers initially.

Sramana Mitra: But that’s a segmentation question. Do you want to go for the low-end customers and get a lot of them or high-end customers but fewer of them? That’s a fundamental pricing question.

Aviram Jenik: I think you’re right about that. We did have an advantage there. We were able to figure out early that the difference between those low-end customers and the high-end customers is the number of computers they have. After a little while, we started charging by computer.

A bigger problem we had was how do we charge by usage. We started out by saying, “If you want a check on your network then you pay us. Then you pay us again for another test.” That usually makes sense. Then we saw, “If we do that, we’re actually discouraging people from doing scans.”

Sramana Mitra: They don’t do that many scans because you’re going to be charged.

Aviram Jenik: Exactly. It’s like a penalty. We switched to a time-based SaaS model where you pay monthly. It was very painful figuring these things out.

This segment is part 5 in the series : A Serial Bootstrapper’s Journey: Beyond Security CEO Aviram Jenik
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