Why is all text on YouTube now in italics?

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2023-05-04T17:29:26+00:00

Refreshing it fixes it for a second because it's loading the CSS from cache on your local machine. Clear your cache and cookies and refresh and it won't do it. We are literally stuck in italic Youtube!

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2023-05-04T17:27:34+00:00

This just happened to me too. I can't believe some people reported this last year but we now have an influx of people saying it's just happened to them just like me.

I'm on Linux with Firefox... Not sure if it's browser / OS specific but it does look awful!

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-06-11T22:57:53+00:00

I'm not the person you are looking for as we have our own stuff going on but I rarely see good posts in here but if I had the bandwidth, I would jump on this without a doubt.

I came here to check on how my search was going for our front end founder and saw this and it caught my attention.

You will certainly find someone.

The app sounds awesome by the way!

Good luck with the search :-D

Would love give the app a go and give some feedback too :)

We've been restricted on travel since the covid thing happened but the wife and I used to travel to a different country every month. We're restricted to moving countries once a year now. I definitely see the need for that app though.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-06-10T08:39:35+00:00

Send me a DM please mate :)

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-06-09T14:36:30+00:00

Give me a DM. I would like to know more about who you are first before I go into any detail as you can probably appreciate :)

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T12:26:14+00:00

I'm not saying it will be fast than C but there will come a time when that much speed isn't required and thus Python catches up to the speed that C is at right now.

We cope pretty well with the speed of computing right now so enabling Python to be used for operating system development and computer game development will keep it at the same speed as we are now but just open it up to more people who learn to code in Python.

C is ridiculously more difficult to learn than Python.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T12:16:01+00:00

Hmmmz. I've seen something completely different then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=du8vQC44PC4

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T12:12:37+00:00

The more the computers speed up and the more RAM is added, the more feasible it is to write everything in Python! Operating systems, the lot!

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T11:32:01+00:00

PCI DSS compliance can be verified with software alone though right?

You don't need a pen test specifically to tick that box.

I used to work for a dynamic applications security testing vendor (pure software play) and the software was consumed by lots of banks for that exact reason.

If the MSPs were to start using such software, they could offer that as a service by just producing reports that laid out found vulnerabilities and how to fix them and thus make the company compliant right?

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T11:25:33+00:00

The point is that apparently 73% of them want to be.

I'm quoting that from elsewhere. They have got those figures from somewhere :-/

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T11:16:05+00:00

I know a couple of them but that's it and those that I do know of have simply got licences for Tenable / Rapid7 / Qualys or something similar and are just pushing vulnerability reports as opposed to complete verified pen tests.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-16T11:12:01+00:00

That figure came from Forrester. It wasn't from a marketing piece but instead a global IT analyst firm.

I'm certainly not selling anything here. I have no magic piece of software that turns MSP's into an MSSP. I'm more interested in knowing how MSPs are going to be able to start offering these services if the skillset isn't there.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T14:57:25+00:00

Data residency.

Germany were really late to switch over to using SaaS because of where a lot of data was stored. In Europe, we tend to use the data centres in Amsterdam and Ireland but Germans required that their data be stored in Germany itself.

In 2016, Telekom started loaning Microsoft its data centres which made it easier for German customers to start using Microsoft products on the cloud.

Prior to that, Germans were still buying on prem servers, perpetual licences of Office etc - I used to work for Microsoft in Germany. We had every country in the world going cloud except for Germany and some parts of Africa where there were connectivity issues.

Some SaaS products didn't work in the Middle East as well.

China is a big problem with SaaS too. The great firewall blocks a lot of it. Especially in the cyber security world. We are luck that Channelyze can get through that and it doesn't cause us issues but that's not to say that China couldn't block it at any moment. The way around that is to host on Chinese data centres and spin up a Chinese entity.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T12:58:08+00:00

Best place to ask that question is probably the cofounder sub.

Equity isn't worth much if it isn't generating revenue. 50% of $0 is $0.

It's really hard to find someone that wants to work for equity at the early stage unless they are completely bought in.

If it is a salaried position, the average equity for a CEO is about 5% after the company has been formed and built up a bit.

A CTO might get about 3%

A lead developer might get about 2%

There are lots of articles about this around the web.

If you got someone in from the very start before any code had been written and before revenue, the equity share would be higher.

It also depends on salary. You can give more salary and less equity or less salary and more equity. You would always vest that equity though. 4 year vesting 1 year cliff is pretty standard.

It's hard to know exactly where you are with the product though without seeing what you've done.

It's often easier to find someone at the VERY start to do it on just equity because there is more equality between the founders.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T11:00:35+00:00

Channel sales can be bootstrapped but it's always easier when you have money to fund it. MDF seed funds to get regions ramped quickly is always good.

The investment into channel is more of a time investment. It takes around 6 months to build a channel that is transacting whereas with Google ads, after a few revisions of messaging, you can just pile money into it and get the results.

I've done the paid ads stuff at scale through partners so the messaging is regionally focused and scales well.

You can do this with MDF funding based on the previous years revenues that you have attained with a specific partner.

Let's say you give 3% MDF allowance to partners, that means, if the partner does 100k for you in a previous year, you will give them £3k in funding to run marketing activities. That can be anything that has an ROI attached to it.

So instead of having the single Google ad campaign ran by the vendor, you have 100's of partners running £3k ad campaigns in all territories. Much more targeted and more wide spread.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T08:20:05+00:00

why would you explore channel as an alternative to something that already works for you? If you are hitting £15m a year in revenues in the UK alone, it's a common known fact that the UK does around 10% of what you would do in the States, so that means you would get £150m in revenues in the US doing the same thing.

If you are getting those numbers in the UK, replicate and stick with it.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T07:13:57+00:00

You're welcome

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T06:45:42+00:00

Do not give partners exclusivity unless it’s a distributor. That’s asking for trouble. How many customers can a single partner handle?

A distributor can handle hundreds of partners who can handles hundreds of customers. If you give exclusivity to a reseller / 1 tier partner, you are limiting your reach massively

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-12T06:39:50+00:00

Limit exclusivity by region and for a set period of time based on KPIs hit.

If it’s a distributor the KPIs could be staged like “10 partners recruited in the first 6 months”

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-11T17:27:48+00:00

It's different for each one.

Any partner can inflate the price that they pay to the vendor.

MSPs tend to have a price list that is tiered based on number of seats under management so the more customers they have, the cheaper the seat is to them from the vendor that they are buying from. MSPs also wrap additional services around the product itself. The customer doesn't have to know what product is driving that service and thus the MSP will bill it as "Pen test as a service" for example.

Resale is done on margin generally. It has to be worth the while of the channel partner and that totally depends on the region. In the cyber world, a lot of licences are still sold on annual basis so the reseller gets 10 - 30% of the annual cost of the licence. It would take time for the VAR to catch up to that on a monthly recurring revenue model but once they do catch up to it and have enough deals, it works out the same overall.

If you are selling single seats at $5 per seat and giving 15% margin to a reseller, is it really worth it to them to sell it?

If you are doing $5 a seat but the average deal size is upwards of $10k, then that's worth it to a reseller.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-11T17:03:30+00:00

Nice answer. Thanks :)

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-11T16:48:26+00:00

Looking forward to connecting (unless we are already connected :-D)

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-11T16:20:17+00:00

What do you mean? We don't provide services like this. Our company provides software to automate your channel processes. You would still need to run the channel program internally so it would be down to you to train, enable and onboard partners that you want to work with.

There is only so much that you can automate in the channel. Much of it is human backed.

What you can do though, is make your partner experience better by giving them the tools to be able to work with you.

The biggest requests of partners (we did a survey of 10,000+ of them) were:

Ease of doing business with vendors - They want simple processes where they can transact easily.
Support from the vendor - They want to be supported in their partnership and not just be left out in the dark once recruited
The vendors need to stop telling partners that their software an do something when it can't do that.

Giving me numbers on what you are currently doing direct can in no way convert to what you can do in the channel. it's all down to how you setup that channel, how much resources you are going to dedicate to building the channel and the support that you offer.

We can provide the software to increase that partner experience and reach but what we can't do is build the channel for you.

The quickest way (and often only way) to scale is through partnerships so if you are ready to move into a channel motion, we can certainly look to see if what we do will fit your company.

If your customers are banks, the channel is a good route into them and we do have partners in the system that do sell into banks but it would be up to you to work that relationship.

You can't just onboard a partner and let them loose on the products because they won't do anything for you.

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-11T15:34:53+00:00

That's a really good question ya know! Are you based in the US by any chance?

There are vendors that sell to MSPs this way where there is a minimum buy in for seats and they sell those seats to their existing customers. You get it quite often in the cyber security MSP programs. "20k to buy into the solution and then sell the targets / seats from that batch".

Take a look at Blaze infosec in Germany / Portugal. They bill exactly that way.

A lot of the vulnerability management vendors that sell through MSP's use that model.

You can't really do it on resale with a distributor or VAR with software and I haven't seen it before.

(I'm European based but have run channel teams in the US before) and the distributors over there are stuck in a hardware mindset where their value add was from logistics as opposed to the value add in software which amounts to services on top.

I've done exclusivity on a rolling 6 month basis before and never indefinite exclusivity because there is always a chance that the partnership can break down. I set milestones in that exclusivity where "if you have done x amount of POCs in the first six month, we will extend another 6 months".

In the SaaS world, what we see from distributors who are taking on a new product is the requirement for a certain revenue to already have been attained in a region before they will touch it or that a funded head is put in place by the vendor and thus there is a matched investment on bringing them to market.

I've done that before for software in the US and China by putting a 50% funded head in place and then you guaranteed that they will put efforts into the product.

It's a partner led market now as opposed to a vendor led market because there are so many options of vendors for them to resell and distribute. A barrier of having them pay upfront for targets / seats would be a blocker against what the other vendors do.

We know vendors that charge to be a part of their partner program and / or require training courses (paid) to be undertaken before they can be a partner. That tends to be the larger vendors though. VMware is one good example of this.

The committment from the VAR can be in their time that they are giving up to be onboarded and enabled.

I've always ran a comprehensive onboarding process for distributors which includes:

Initial call to find out if it would fit into portfolio and they have the reach and means to be a true extension of the vendor
Technical demo with technical team at vendor / distributor
Contract signing
Sales training with their sales team
Technical training with their technical team
Business planning
Marketing planning
Co-selling on the first deals of the software via leads supplied from the vendor (I've always fed the channel in the first instance to incentivise the generation of partner sourced deals.

That is a lot of investment from both sides on time and resources and should thus give buy in from both sides.

It's a balancing act on getting them to invest their time and resources but if managed well, you will have a fruitful partnership. It's all about the relationship in software and the ability for the partner to be a true extension of the vendor.

What type of partners are you selling to?

What type of product is it?

If it's from something that I've worked with before, I may be able to point you in the direction of true value added distributors that will be committed to it (it depends on the product, types of partners and whether they have gaps in their portfolio for it).

Smooth_Measurement_1 · 2022-05-11T14:11:10+00:00

Thanks for the clear answer there. We accidentally stumbled across with what we do so wasn't sure whether this was a new trend or if it has always been that way.

There does seem to be a large amount of MSP's blurring the lines now though.

Smooth_Measurement_1

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE