Failpool: Cyber Sanitation
People and organizations do not anticipate paying extra for sanitation. Thus, most businesses will not agree to pay additional funds to receive sanitation after they pay their taxes.
When deciding to name our business “cyber sanitation” it was a poor choice. Despite our branding blunder, this was not the reason cyber sanitation is entering the “failpool”.
The premise of this service was to detect negative notations on domains from cybersecurity lists (phishing, malware or other malicious angle) and to offer domain reputation cleanup so that their domain was not blocked by browsers or cybersecurity applications.
The audience of potential clients are site admins, owners or operators. They can presently have a problem, or if not, they will receive free scans and may encounter a problem we can help with in the future.
The difficulty was in reaching the target audience.
Multiple attempts to filter traffic and to communicate on our website that this is a tool for site operators failed. Most of the traffic was instead from users who wished to validate a site url before visiting to ensure it is unmalicious. This failure to qualify traffic lead to ending testing for Cyber Sanitation.
We saw another obstacle in the distance. When an organization has a serious domain reputation issue such as chrome browsers blocking their users, they reach out to their trusted IT staff or partner. They are less likely to work with someone new, such as Cyber Sanitation, at this sensitive point.
Conscious of this problem, we quered ourselves: What about making trusted IT providers our customers?
This is an interesting angle. However, our service is a simple, low operating cost model that markets with low costs per acquisition. However, marketing to IT services providers would introduce far higher costs of customer acquisition while our lifetime customer values would remain modest in relative terms since we are not offering additional services to the relationships acquired.
—> The economics do not work targeting the the IT services audience.
So for now cyber san, we’ll put you on ice. Maybe we’ll meet again.
