We’ve built an enterprise platform and API to serve data that helps carriers, OEMs etc. to add a layer of security to their devices. To demonstrate how they can make use of our data we built a bunch of consumer apps. We haven’t seen huge downloads (about 35K weekly active users) but we’re confident that traction by way of stickiness is good (admittedly we haven’t looked at the numbers in a while because we were never focused on the “consumer” per se). Customers are very passionate about our products. But again, we’ve always had our eye on the enterprise solution as the consumer route takes too long.
We have learned the (very) hard way, that the enterprise sales cycle is just too long for us to last. In fact, we haven’t sold a single enterprise solution. What’s worse is that some of the biggest companies in the world evaluated us against our competitors and we won. But they put implementation on hold.
Our inability to close an enterprise deal could be down to the fact that we haven’t closed the first one in order to encourage others to follow.
So, we’re running out of money very fast and we don’t have “traction” (huge increases with hockey curves) to demonstrate that we have what it takes to raise the next round. And it’s taking too long to close an enterprise deal.
We have a third approach. We have a solution to make apps more secure. Not sure who would buy it though. Senior technical people in some large companies think it’s a great idea. But I’m not convinced if app owners would pay and developers are almost certainly not going to pay – at least that’s what we’re told. I’m not sure. I know they don’t like paying for stuff, but this could help them generate a rev share on something that requires only a couple of lines of code.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.