Weekly Update 21: The Pitch
That was a long week and exciting week. I’d had so many more accomplishments last week and my business is starting to take off at a rapid pace. I just have to pace myself, so without further a due, let’s get this show on the road!
The Business
I’ve had some success recently with my business and I’ve been doing sales pitches to hosting companies and institutions for denial of service protection & WAF software that’s entirely customizable via web panel. It’s been a huge hit with tons of businesses and they’re all wanting to setup our software on their infrastructure. I’ve talked about it before, but, our software is a high-performance custom web server with layer 7 protection, advanced challenges and over 1,000 signatures to look for and block.
Within the last two weeks, one customer has been under significant attack and our software has kept them online. The lowest request volume for the web flowing through is around 75,000 requests per second — at it’s peak, we observed over 220,000 requests per second. This is quite a significant attack, and our software has held up against it without needing any customization of the box. After the first attack, the access log was 8 GB in file-size, and contained around 130 M entries from this botnet attack (wow!).
It’s a pretty satisfying feeling being able to sit there and watch your creation do what it was intended to do: stop attacks of all sizes! With this in mind, I’m working hard on sales and marketing while developing the product even more. I’ve brought on a proper graphic designer, and I’ve got another engineer working with me to build the product. As I consider our next steps for growth, it’s a good opportunity to find talent to assist in this process!
Personal Life
On the personal side of things, it’s been incredible having more time to spend with my family and hang around. When I’m not working, pitching and making sales, I’ve decided myself to spending more time with my family. Last night we all sat down and watched a movie, chatted and relaxed! I always have maintained that the key to success is having a good family and support, and I’m grateful for the one I have!
What’s next?
Next on my plate is outreach to potential customers, do some more marketing, and swing sales. I’m also looking into containerizing some components of the solution and running OpenStack for it all. OpenStack appeals to me because of it’s simplicity, floating IPs, block storage, and full KVM (Nova) with Docker/Kubernetes support (Magnum) that can be run in unison without issue. The floating IPs are attractive for live-migrations of scrubbing and analysis centers, and migrating the web panel too. I’m going to be doing some more serious research on that, here’s hoping it’s the solution we need as we scale our own infrastructure for developing, testing and demonstrations!
That’s all for now, have a great week!