A New beginning & a new venture

Sorry in advance for the long post, but it has been a while. This time - something personal, general thoughts & the new venture - ForceNock.

Life is one short beautiful venture that should be explored. In whichever direction it may take you, it is an opportunity for new beginnings, and ForceNock is my latest one.

 Most of you will remember me from my former employment. Until one year ago I was the CEO and co-founder – for over 5 years – of ReSec Tech, a cyber-security network protection solution.

One year ago I also had the most amazing experience of becoming a dad. My wife and I were blessed with a baby, our first born and the most amazing addition to our family. This responsibility led me to take a few months off work so I could focus on my family. I must say, there is nothing quite like being a first-time parent. Nobody prepares you for it and it is so rewarding. Especially as the little one enjoys having 10 long hours of sleep! 

 The new path

The time with ReSec was priceless as I learned and experienced a lot. My partially grey hair is proof of that. With every success and mistake, you learn and become a better entrepreneur and ReSec was not my first venture. I have been an entrepreneur for, give or take, 10 years.

Every new venture is exciting. It is the most amazing feeling starting everything from scratch. The play-book is quite similar when starting a new venture. You have to remember the following (I will elaborate later):

1.       Team Team Team!

2.       Ideas are a commodity and in Israel, you have so many of those.

3.       Building a great technology is key, but it is only part of the challenge. You will face pivotal moments that will require the solution and technology to change. Change is a constant and an expected given in Startup. The drive to that will be the market. Market validation as early as possible is important.

4.       Later on – many other things are important – like focus on product-market fit as you want to make something someone will actually want to buy. But this is for another post.

The team is the most important thing. This is not a cliché and no wonder a VC will likely ask you how long you have known each other and drill about each member background. Your ability to communicate as a team, to execute your plan, to adjust and grow together; all of those are the basics needed to build a successful venture. If a relationship between the partners is unstable, raising money will only make it worse.

Worth mentioning the team personal knowledge with respect to the problem you are trying to solve, the customers, channels etc. is super important as part of the “team” ability to execute and your overall startup story.

The second important thing is understanding your market and the customer’s needs. So, my first action is always to go and meet my potential customers. Real customers and not just “friends that are customers”. No other way to get the much-needed market validation. To get the most out of those customer interviews I would recommend this book “The mom test”, by Rob Fitzpatrick. Remember those discussions can also help to build your future relations and funnel – so be nice and use it to form a customer network for the future.

With respect to that remember 2 things:

1. We are in Israel and are proud of it :-), but our market in most cases is not. You need to talk to the customers that are from your target market. Talking to Israeli based companies might not give a clear picture of the market requirements.
2. If you have an access to domain experts that can share their perspective, in my case – Gartner, Forrester etc. – that is also important. If nothing else, they have reached to more customers than you and are better suited to state what those customers are looking for. But the benefit of talking to them goes to competitive, trends etc. and they need to know you!

Those basic guidelines can help you make sure you are not doing something based only on your gut feeling. Gut feeling is important, but you might be falling into the trap of being “in-love” with your own idea to notice that it is not as great as you might think it is.

And everyone can be wrong...

What about ForceNock?

ForceNock is my new venture dealing with Web Security.

Our aim is to disrupt the Web Security traditional market by offering a solution that renders all the manual intensive configuration that is currently required as obsolete while giving better security and better performance.

With ForceNock we did exactly as I’ve mentioned and much more.

I have great great great partners with me. (I can’t state this enough)

We talk to our potential customers, industry experts and even our competitors.

And once we felt we had market validation it was time to get the right design partners to prove our claim to fame – we can better mitigate web risks “out-of-the-box” with Zero Configuration.

We got to those design partners via our relationship and the clear need they had for a solution. Together we are pushing the solution forward ensuring it creates value at every step.

We also took part in SigmaLabs accelerator program, sponsored by Entrée Capital, Yahoo! And AWS. Highly recommended as they gave us exactly what they state – execution acceleration.

So what is next?

A Startup is a long, exciting journey with ups and downs. “There's no fate but what we make for ourselves” (Sarah Connor). And we just started making our first baby steps, but we are here for the long run with an incredible solution, great feedbacks, promising market and most important - great friends.

Got to run - the little one got up and it is my shift :-)

Will continue to share our progress and my own personal insights, for what they are worth and As always keep safe, Dotan Bar Noy