Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe (Part 1)

Ben and his co-founder are two techies who started by bootstrapping with a paycheck. With zero marketing budget, they have scaled TryHackMe to a million users and significant revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Ben Spring: I was born and raised in Portsmouth. I also went to the University of Portsmouth. I have a degree in Computer Science.

Sramana Mitra: When did you come out of college?

Ben Spring: It was in 2018.

Sramana Mitra: It was right before the pandemic and the internet is in high gear.

Ben Spring: Yes, as was the lack of cyber security training, which is a perfect fit for TryHackMe at that time.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do when you came out of college? What was the next step?

Ben Spring: I was working for a government entity in the UK. Because TryHackMe, which is an online cybersecurity training platform, had started as a side project in 2019, it had grown so much by the time I finished university that I was only in the role for about a month before leaving to do TryHackMe full-time.

Sramana Mitra: You started TryHackMe while still a student?

Ben Spring: Yes, I co-founded it with someone I met at a summer internship.

Sramana Mitra: Go back to the year that you started TryHackMe. How did it all come together? Why did you start this cybersecurity training platform while you were still a student?

Ben Spring: A couple of years ago, I met my co-founder Ashu. We were at a summer internship doing cybersecurity consultancy work. We found it so difficult to break into the field. At the end of the internship, we threw all of our notes together and made a platform called TryHackMe. An incredible amount of people were experiencing the same problem.

Sramana Mitra: People were finding you through Google search?

Ben Spring: Yes, it’s completely organic. I’ve never invested any money into marketing. It’s been completely organic and word-of-mouth.

Sramana Mitra: Was this platform free?

Ben Spring: At first, we released everything for free. We had a weird pricing model back then where it was pay-as-you-go. It didn’t scale and work well for what we wanted at that time. The first version was the MVP. It was the minimal thing you could think of. It was just a page and training material.

Sramana Mitra: How many users did you get to in that mode?

Ben Spring: Getting our first hundred users were pretty much like trying to shout TryHackMe everywhere online. We went to Reddit posts. We went to friends. That’s how we acquired our first hundred users.

Sramana Mitra: From the first hundred, what was the next number?

Ben Spring: It scaled really quickly. It went to a hundred. A couple of months later, we had 500 when we ran our first event. Then it snowballed more and more. We went to 50,000, to 100,000. Today, we’re over 1.1 million users. The growth has come primarily over the last 18 months.

This segment is part 1 in the series : Student Developers Bootstrapping with a Paycheck, Then Growing to a Million Users: Ben Spring, CEO of TryHackMe
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