Hello it's Dennis and we now will speak with Jan from Crashtest Security he will
tell us how to solve problems with QA and how to automate this process so can
you just describe how what is a product is doing and how you solve some
problems of course so our product automates security testing for web
applications and api's so if you develop any product that's on the web or you
have an app on your phone you probably have an API in the background and you
need to do at some point you need to do what we call a penetration test it's not
something that you will do it the first day of your startup but at some point
your customer will ask you for it it's your application secure and what our
software enables you to do is to drastically reduce the cost for the
security testing and it also automates it so you're not doing it just once but
you can do it automatically for every release. Ok, and does your project work with all
technologies like back end technologies PHP, Python, Java maybe .NET? -Yeah so a
little bit of background so you have two types of security testing for
applications, one is we call it white box then you look at the source code and the
other part is black box then you look at the application from the outside just
like a hacker would see it when he goes on the web, and our solution focus on the
black box testing so for us it doesn't matter what the technology is in the
background because we look from the outside
Interesting, do you have some programs for startups who can use your firstly maybe some
discounts? Yeah so if you go on our website it's crashtest-security. com
and you just register you get a 30-day free trial so if you don't do anything
else just register on our website do your first scan see if you have any
vulnerabilities or not and you already got some value out of it right so you
can either sleep better or you know what to address in the future. It was a little
ad from WebSummit. So can you share your ideas for example for start-up entrepreneurs
how to get your first paid clients,
how to make a great demo? Yeah of course
like nobody wants to talk about security testing right, so if you go to
somebody hey how what's the security of your web of application nobody like yes
that's a great topic so you really need to understand where are the guys going
that you want to talk to so for us it's somebody like a developer and he's
really frustrated with this penetration test because it takes long yes to set up
a specific process it's not agile so where do these guys go when they want to
find out about it it's mostly security conferences there are blogs so that's
where we go and that's how we find our customers because these are the guys
that we that we need to talk with because they are actually the the people
that have the problem for us it's not enough to know which company has this
problem one of our customers is flix post for example and for them they use a
lot of apps of course and they develop an agile fashion but you still need to
have that one person that has this pain that you solving
can you tell me maybe you know how to find your first bit plant what channel
you need to use for some social media websites or just outreach in email so
that's of course different for everybody and we're still working on how to figure
that out even if we have our second round of funding we are tracking the
different channels and for us pairs is by way the best way on how to find our
first customer so because here all the people they have a technical background
they understand a little bit about agile agile development and they are not
afraid to talk about security and maybe what they are not yet doing so for us
fairs work really well for other business I assume it's paid advertising
on Instagram they would not work at all for us because we've tried it and it
didn't work the other channel that works really well for us is partners so if you
have somebody who will sell your product for you that's also a great way
have some affiliate program if anybody is interested we are happy to launch
that of course because our product is quite technical to sell so we need to
give our partner some education on how we sell it so if they anybody's
interested also reach out to us yeah okay so what tips can you advise to use
the tappets upon yours to use from your opinion so when we mostly when we talk
with other startups on security because that's an area of expertise that we have
there are things that you don't need to do the first day like the first thing is
you just want to get your product out you want to showcase it works nobody's
gonna ask you and your first MVP is this secure but at some point you need to
switch and you actually need to think about it so there are some quite easy
things that you can do it from the very beginning like just best coding
practices but then like every like three months or so you should think about hey
is there something else that I can say I should really be doing in the security
state one more question and can you just tell how do you motivate yourself every
day to work that's difficult there are definitely days where you don't have
you're not like super motivated to like pick up the phone and call customers but
ultimately it's about like when you think about down the line you want to
have that exponential growth of your startup and if you're not putting in the
work right now that's never gonna happen or it's gonna happen a day later and it
really depends on what motivates you about your work so what motivates me
every day is I know that if I stalk with customers and I make them aware that
security is something important and it can be done really easy with our
solution that makes their life a little easier and it makes their applications
more secure how do you see enforced on top it's important to have some KPIs and
if you have some KPIs what keep your eyes do you use maybe you always need to
know your churn rate your even you eye amaura what keep guys is the most
important we actually had a great talk yesterday by somebody from 500 startups
about that he like had a great dashboard maybe yeah I can send you a link
somewhere it was really good because it was like you should have your investor
set of KPIs because they want to know m RR how many new customers what's your
sales how many demos did you do and that's all important to give to your
investors because if you don't know that and your investors are not happy then
that's terrible spot to be in but then there should also be a set of KPIs that
you really care about and that you need to know every day so for us we're still
figuring it out but we want to know how do users use our software so how many
come back how many active scans have we running how many new projects are set up
how many vulnerabilities have been fixed and then you also need to know what are
you doing in the sales process and there we need to go really into details how
many visitors you have on your website what's channel is working well is it
paid advertising or fairs like here which works really well for us so it
depends and everybody everybody needs to figure out what KPI is really used are
useful for them ok and what is the biggest mistake this year you have done
on wall of course the tough question but for us we thought in the beginning that
cold calling was a really good way to get to our customers but it's it's
really not scaling so I did a lot of cold calling earlier this year and we
felt like if you're talking to people on the phone you don't get their reactions
you don't know what mood they're in you don't know if they actually have a need
for your product so that's why fairs work way better for us because here if
you to you I know is do you have a need then I if no then okay thank you very
much but if yes then we can actually talk
about the issues that you have so our our mistake was
thinking that the wrong channel would work but through tracking which channels
work best and looking at our KPIs that actually helped us thank you thank you
for interview it's a very good tips thank you very much