[cleverfoo]

I built Scanii [1], an unsafe/malware content detection API/SaaS, as a way to keep my coding skills sharp as I moved into engineering leadership roles. Over the years it has grown into a lovely $35k/month business while spending $0 in marketing thanks to our amazing customers.

My advice to aspiring entrepreneurs: get it out there quick, listen to your customers and be ready to act on their feedback. Finding product/market fit is a journey even if you are selling into the most well understood vertical since it's not just about what the market expects it's about what your engineering talent/capacity can delver in a reasonable amount of time.

[1] https://www.scanii.com

[GordonS]

Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?

Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?

[cleverfoo]

> Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?

Thanks and good question. We don't really compete with virus total since it's more of a research tool and, for a while, their terms explicitly prohibited commercial use (but I think that has changed). Jotti is a similar thing, more of a research tool than a high performance API you can use to build commercial products on.

> Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?

Yeah the product has expended a bunch over the years and we use multiple detection engines [2] to catch all kinds of unsafe content. But you are right, we do license a commercial AV engine to act as a backup to our own to ensure best possible detection rates. The licensing process warrants a blog post of its own since it's not what I would call easy.

[2] https://docs.scanii.com/article/149-how-do-the-different-det...

[lampshades]

Congratulations on your success!

> get it out there quick

What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?

[cleverfoo]

> Congratulations on your success!

That is very kind of you, thank you.

> What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?

For Scanii in particular, the original product was a thin wrapper around an open source AV engine, a hacked on a weekend UX, and a credit card processing integration to collect payment - the very minimal needed to find out if _anyone_ was willing to pay for this service.

With that said, what worked for me in this case is not what I would focus here since it depends on what kind of business you are trying to build. What I do believe is important is focusing on the economics of your space which, for IT, is all about productivity or, more succinctly, saving people's time - they pay you X for something that could cost them, in terms of people's time, Y to do.

So, what you want to ask yourself is whether signing up, paying and onboarding onto your product (the X in the equation above) is significantly lower than the next best alternative, either doing the same on a competitor product or building something themselves - the Y above.

For scanii, even at launch it saved people lots of time managing and operating malware detection engines which are cumbersome and hard to keep up to date. I had a feeling that would be the case when I launched but I couldn't be sure until our first customer voted with their credit card.

[lampshades]

I guess more of what I'm asking is, how did you launch? The biggest problem I have is getting word out about my product, which always ends up killing them.

I'm a developer by trade, so marketing and the like isn't my forte. Did you use ProductHunt? Indiehackers? Reddit? Twitter? Word of mouth?

Thanks for the reply btw, very helpful info. I've been iterating on something in my free time that fills a very small budgeting niche. I'm going to wrap it up with a website this weekend and see if I can gain any traction. At the very least, I know that if I had found the product I've built for $1.99 a month or something, I would have just paid the money. Hoping that others feel the same.

[cleverfoo]

Got it, in that case it helps to build a product for a community you can interact with. In my case, this was connecting with folks on Stackoverflow that were struggling with integrating malware detection into their apps... that was all the marketing I did to get the product validated - but keep in mind that was 10 years or so back.

Best of luck with your launch!

[lampshades]

Thanks for all the advice!