Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me about the competition? There is a whole bunch of players in the EdTech space who also cater to the same customers that you are interested in. Pluralsight is a very good example. Who else do you consider as a competitor?

Ben Spring: There are a couple of labs in the industry. They all have their own USP. Where TryHackMe is really strong is delivering training content to an individual. We heavily embed gamification into the product to make it engaging and fun. A lot of our competitors are catering to the enterprise space.

Despite TryHackMe having a B2B offering, we still want to make sure that our B2C offering is really strong. That is our top of the funnel — people who come on the platform as individuals who really love the products and then recommend that to their businesses or schools.

Sramana Mitra: That gamification is the reason why it doesn’t make sense for you to also use companies like Pluralsight and Udemy as your channels. You want your gamified experience.

Ben Spring: Absolutely. It’s not just the gamification piece. The thing that TryHackMe does differently is creating safe and legal environments to practice hacking. On TryHackMe, you can spin up a machine in a safe environment. It’s not just theoretical knowledge. You’re applying that into practice.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. In 2022, you’re on track for $8 million in revenue?

Ben Spring: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Are you still completely self-funded?

Ben Spring: Yes. We’ve been fighting off investors. We want to remain completely bootstrapped.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. Why have you come to that conclusion?

Ben Spring: We want to build a product that users love, and we don’t want to be influenced by some investor telling us to get the most return on investment to make the most money. We want complete autonomy. We believe in delivering a really strong user experience and focusing a lot of energy on that. If we shift to B2B completely, it could be more lucrative. However, we are really trying to deliver a great user experience to individuals and not just companies. We’ve been very fortunate that we have the flexibility to do that.

Sramana Mitra: When I started One Million by One Million, I was offered funding. I remember one of the VCs said, “You should do a lead generation business model. This education stuff is great, but it’s not going to scale. I can fund you.” I said I don’t want to do lead generation.

I want the autonomy to stick to my mission and vision of what I want to do with my company. It’s a very legitimate point of staying true and preserving the integrity of your mission and vision. If that means turning down venture capital, so be it.

Ben Spring: It has its challenges. I’ve never really worked at a company before, so there’s a lot of learning on the job. I’m so glad that I did it. I’ve learned so much.

Sramana Mitra: I was a computer science grad student at MIT in 1994 when I started my first company. I didn’t know anything about how to start a company. This was before the internet happened. We didn’t have a way to go to Google and look things up. Google was founded in 1999. Right now, it’s a lot easier to learn what you need to learn. At that time, it was much harder.

It was very nice to meet you. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe
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