Benjamin Netter- Founder Of Riot- Protects Your Company From Phishing Starting $199 A Month!

Benjamin Netter is a French tech entrepreneur. He co-founded in 2014 the biggest European crowd lending platform October, who financed over 500 companies in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands and Germany. He’s now focusing on Riot, a tool reinventing the way employees are protected against cybersecurity risks.

Riot trains your team against phishing, the number-one cause of data breaches.

In an exclusive interview with AsiaTechDaily, Benjamin says:

Your story needs to be short and easily understandable. Simplifying a pitch is very hard and takes a tremendous amount of time, but in the end, if you can’t simplify your pitch, it probably means your idea is too complicated.

President Woodrow Wilson explained that very well when asked how long it takes to prepare for a speech: “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if an hour, I am ready now.”. It’s counter-intuitive but very accurate.

The best advice I ever received is to start small. It echoes with simplifying ideas: you need to keep it low enough to be launched in a few weeks at best. You don’t want to spend months working on a product and realize no one wants to use it once you launched it.

Read on to know more about Benjamin Netter and his journey.

Please tell me about your personal background, and what are you working on currently?

Benjamin Netter: I’ve been coding for the past 20 years and launching products for the previous 10. For the past 5 years, I’ve been the co-founder/CTO of a multinational Fintech called October, financing loans for small businesses in France, Spain, Italy, Netherlands, and Germany. We financed over 400m€ worth of investments over the last few years. As the CTO of a rapidly growing startup, it was my job to maintain the right level of security for the 110 employees we had, spread across 5 different offices. I discovered how hard and time consuming it was, and that’s how I decided to work on Riot.

Riot is a phishing training solution for teams: it sends phishing emails on your team, to detect who are the most vulnerable employees to phishing attacks in your team.

How have you attracted users and grown your product from the start till now?

Benjamin Netter: Most of the growth, for now, is organic. As any new product, we mostly rely on the press and networks we have. Although it’s not scalable long term, it’s a great way to get the first 100 early adopters.

What’s your business model, and how have you grown your revenue? What strategy worked best?

Benjamin Netter: Riot has a straightforward business model: it costs $4/month to protect an employee. Most cybersecurity companies have obscure pricing models. We want the pricing to be very obvious and easy to understand.

What are some marketing tips to help maximize the success of a product launch?

Benjamin Netter: Your story needs to be short and easily understandable. Simplifying a pitch is very hard and takes a tremendous amount of time, but in the end, if you can’t simplify your pitch, it probably means your idea is too complicated.

President Woodrow Wilson explained that very well when asked how long it takes to prepare for a speech: “If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation; if an hour, I am ready now.”. It’s counter-intuitive but very accurate.

What’s the hardest thing about product launches? And What is a good product launch checklist to be well prepared?

Benjamin Netter: I think launches are overrated. Do you remember when Facebook launched? Probably not. That being said, you can fail your launch. The best way to fail a start is not being prepared for the rush. That means, of course, your website has to be ready to handle the rush, but also your customer success team. You don’t get a ton of chances to make an excellent first impression. Responding to your first customers in under 5 minutes is one requirement for an excellent first impression.

How do you plan to expand globally?

Benjamin Netter: My experience in October proved that we don’t want to scale globally to early. Until we have 100 pleased customers, we won’t try to scale globally.

What are the most common mistakes companies make with global marketing?

Benjamin Netter: Growing October over 5 countries, I realized that every country has very different ways to communicate, even within proximity. For example, Spain communicates a lot over Whatsapp, whereas we don’t do it in France. The most common mistake is considering all countries in the same area are communicating the same way.

How do you handle this COVID-19 outbreak situation for your company’s survival in the future?

Benjamin Netter: Riot is a remote-first company. That doesn’t mean we don’t have an office, but it means we’re ready to work from anywhere if we have to. The COVID-19 situation has zero impact on our productivity.

That being said, what we’ve been observing for the past few weeks is that hackers are trying to profit from the current disorganization of the world to send more phishing attacks than usual. For newly remote organizations, Riot can help prepare employees for upcoming attacks.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received? And What advice do you have for someone who is interested in doing similar things like yours or in a similar direction?

Benjamin Netter: The best advice I ever received is to start small. It echoes with simplifying ideas: you need to keep it low enough to be launched in a few weeks at best. You don’t want to spend months working on a product and realize no one wants to use it once you launched it.

What are the one or two things that you would do differently if you could go back to 10 years ago?

Benjamin Netter: For a long time, I underestimated the value of a good team. In the end, the team is what make or break a startup.

You can follow Benjamin Netter here.

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