Starting a Business During a Pandemic

Starting a Business During a Pandemic

Oleg Braginsky, the founder of School of Troubleshooters, talks about a promising niche in the IT market and discusses best practices with Vladislav Chernov, a cybersecurity specialist.

Some say that crisis is a time for great opportunities, while others holding their breaths for a better time to come. But some industries are less dependent on the situation.

We have analyzed promising IT fields: fintech, blockchain, and data protection. The financial market is limited to hundreds of players and dozens of popular solutions. You must adjust your services to demanding clients’ expectations and survive severe competition. All the hype around cryptocurrencies ceases drastically. What is left? Security tools!

Let us talk about its benefits:

? stable growth of the market;

? wide range of consumers;

? demand for protection services is inelastic and high;

? additional benefit – currency earnings when selling abroad;

? clients abroad are willing to pay more for a product, while our workforce is cheaper.

An obvious downside – we are not alone in this market. Thousands of players are trying to succeed, releasing the ‘best’ antiviruses. The hall of fame is shared between several companies. And attempts to compete with them are compared to a mouse fighting an elephant. This market is occupied. What should we do? Surrender or search for a new path? We decided to dig deeper.

Top market players emerged earlier than others. They protect servers, hostings, communication channels, and software. There is no place for you if you are not related to Einstein. Then cloud solutions caught our attention. SaaS services, to be precise. They are easy to use and have many benefits when it comes to updates.

The malware on websites is dangerous to both the visitors and the resource. If aimed to infect the portal, it replaces links to pages with ads and forbidden content. If aimed to threaten website visitors, it strives to penetrate the operating system, steal passwords, damage data, and get files.

A wake-up call for checking the website:

? code snippets on the website look suspicious;

? a landing page does not work correctly or being blocked by an antivirus or browser;

? problems with indexation, significant changes in traffic rates.

Simple steps to protect the website from hacking:

? make regular updates;

? set protection plugins;

? do not use pirated software;

? install the antivirus and check the website for threats regularly;

? do not search for plugins and other items at unverified sources.

After detailed analysis, we have stumbled upon WordPress with its 80,000,000 users, who like the simplicity of operations, enjoy variety of features and settings, public community, and free access to the resource. Because WordPress is free, big players do not enter the niche, and the platform is full of horrible security breaches.

We tried to take advantage of this and conducted a competitor analysis. There were many plugins and exciting products on the market. But most of them have not reached even 10,000 installations. Moreover, those were free clients, and the conversion to premium fluctuated at the level of 2 percent. No one wanted to spend many years gaining a reputation.

Our next step was to study promotion methods. Most campaigns were associated with influencers. A competent review gives you new followers, while social networks and contextual ads are useless. We have designed the architecture of a potential solution – a security tool against hackers and automated attacks:

The project got a name – Titan, as ancient Greek gods. We spent several years developing the plugin and extending its features. We have implemented threat scanner, spam prevention, firewall, website health monitoring, security audit, two-factor authentication, and push notifications:

One of the greatest obstacles was the ability to cure malicious code fragments without damaging the integrity of the remaining parts. We have enabled two operation modes: automatic scanning for known malware and an expert version where our team got access to the website source code:

As for the antispam protection, we have implemented a three-stage traffic filtering by bots, a scanner for matching content with blacklisted websites, and a self-trained analytical model. The system filters frequently posted comments and self-learns. We offered clients detailed statistics, regular updates, and ongoing support.

Titan is a promising product. It has over 200,000 users, and most of them are from the West. On the initial stage, we planned to deliver features to scan and prevent threats. Thus, we needed to know how to detect and neutralize viruses.

First, we have implemented dashboards with the current protection status:

Next, we have delivered the firewall activation...

... and a security audit mode:

The next logical step was implementing a malware scanner...

... and the availability monitoring:

Another big step ahead of us is a promotion. It includes partnership programs, posting reviews, participating in conferences and exhibitions, communicating with the audience, attracting experts for ‘packaging’ solutions and positioning, and text & visual improvements of our website:

Our priorities are accurate language and elegant design. Compare Yandex and Google home pages. The first one is too wordy with many notifications. The Western world does not like a hustle. Visitors associate messy websites with Indian and leave it for good. Let us end the article with an open question that torments us: Do we need Titan in our countries?

Translator: Vladislav Chernov

Source: Spark