On this date in 2022 I met Maximillian Schweizer for the first time. It was a Saturday. He was a first year student at a college in California and wanted to get into cybersecurity. The next day we had another Zoom meeting and I hired him on the spot as an intern.
His first task was to take over the Airtable database I had created and output the text fields we needed to produce the Directory in Security Yearbook 2022.
The Airtable database:
The text output:
The three text files (alphabetical, by country, and by category) were passed to the designer for formatting before sending the completed manuscript to the book binder.
Meanwhile, I had been testing a nocode platform called Softr to see if I could create an MVP for the IT-Harvest dashboard. The minimum viable product had two primary requirements:
Be more useful than a Google Sheet.
Allow paying subscribers to download our entire database.
I asked Maximillian to test bubble.io which is more powerful that Softr but has a reputation of being harder to learn. It took about three days for him to create a better app than I had on Softr. So we made bubble our primary platform while Airtable was the back end database.
On March 30, 2022, we officially launched version 1.0 of dashboard.it-harvest.com
We immediately began demonstrating it to our target market of VCs and PE firms. By May 2nd we signed up our first subscriber, one of the top ten private equity companies.
Using bubble for the front end and Airtable for the back end worked great, but it was a little slow. And then in May bubble pushed an update that broke everyone’s connection with Airtable. Without ever communicating with their customers they fixed it in about four hours. When the Airtable integration broke again in August we made the decision to move from Airtable to bubble’s own database. That was Version 2.0 of the Dashboard. By then we had five paying subscribers.
This is what the Version 2.0 Explore tool looked like in September.
By the end of September we had ten paid seat holders. Ten is the magic number for a SaaS platform. It means you have paying subscribers beyond friends and family, all providing feature recommendations which kept Maximillian busy.
But our sales cycle was too long. VCs and PE firms with billions of dollars in investments wanted trial access before they would sign up for a $12K subscription.
The trouble with any bubble app is that a subscriber can use the web-dev tools in their browser to discover the API keys to the database. A savvy user of a limited trial could easily download all of our data in minutes.
So Maximillian embarked on a two week sprint to move the back end from bubble to Xano, a nocode database solution that has much better security. That made trial access easy, and had the additional benefit of allowing us to offer monthly subscriptions. That was Version 3.0 which looks like this today:
On December 19th we announced the monthly subscriptions.
Five new customers immediately signed up for monthly access. We finished the year with 19 seat holders.
What’s Next? AI of course
Version 4.0 of dashboard.it-harvest.com was sparked by research into various AI models by Maximillian. ChatGPT is easily the most exciting new development in tech and ChatGPT is driven by OpenAI’s DaVinci_text_3.5, a powerful large language model (LLM). As I write this Maximillian has DaVinci extracting product names, descriptions, and features from all the cybersecurity vendors. I marvel at the amount of compute resources it takes: 15 hours to process 700 products.
Because this is our biggest update ever it will be our first named version. In the tradition of assigning names to AIs we are going to call it SOCrates. Why the SOC? Because the tectonic shift here is that the platform will transition from a tool for industry researchers to a tool for product selection. While there may be five or six thousand people who track the cybersecurity industry there are hundreds of thousands that can use a platform for product discovery and creating short-lists.
If you want to see the current version in action please reach out to schedule a demo.
richard@it-harvest.com
And subscribe to this Substack to catch the SOCrates launch.