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6 Comments

How Confident Are You That You Would Survive A Hack?

Hello, Charles here with a a question that has been on my mind for quite a while.

I've been listening to many interviews with SaaS founders lately, and one theme that I found was recurrent is their problem with hackers/spammers once they reach a certain level of success. I've been working on a prototype for detecting weird behavior at the user level on your website with the purpose of blocking hackers before they have a chance to find a vulnerability and I had a couple of questions for you guys:

  1. Is that even something that you're worried about?
  2. How likely would you be to let a third party analyze your traffic for fixing that problem?
  3. Would you be interested in testing my prototype? :)

Thanks for reading!

on May 17, 2020
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    I've been working on a prototype for detecting weird behavior at the user level on your website with the purpose of blocking hackers before they have a chance to find a vulnerability

    There's a whole industry that does that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intrusion_detection_system

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      You're totally right, however, I have not been able to find a product that is affordable for someone just getting started without at least a 1k $/mo budget for security... With my prototype I'm able to detect almost every automated tools on your website and can handle a pretty huge amount of traffic, for a fraction of that cost

      I should have rephrased: Should someone who is just getting started be interested about security?

      1. 1

        If your target market is early stage startups, I would say that what's almost more important than defending against the hack itself is being able to prove that you're able to defend against hacks.

        As an early stage startup, the probability of being hacked is pretty low. You're simply not valuable enough for anyone to put up more than a token effort to get your stuff. However, the probability of a client asking for a security audit is basically 100% if you want to work with medium+ businesses.

        The product itself is important. If the product can also help me prove that I'm secure and help me get deals, that's what'll really get my interest.

        1. 1

          Very interesting point of view, thanks a lot for that comment, that gave me a whole new way of looking at the problem. I was struggling to find a way to justify paying for that as an early stage company, but I think you hit the right spot

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            For sure man. And feel free to ping for feedback when you come up with something.