How Whitehawksoftware CEO Katrin Jakob grew Whitehawksoftware to $731.8K revenue and 2 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is katrine jacobs she's a phd and is the co-founder of white hawk software and responsible for business development client acquisition marketing and raising capital she's worked for more than 20 years in the technology and academics and the private industry managing research groups and accelerating us market entry for german based companies katrina are you ready to take us to the top absolutely yes all right tell us about white hawk what does the company do and what's your revenue model how do you guys make money yes so um so white talk software is a cyber security company and that's a very wide area and uh you know it's it's a complicated technical area and if you want to be cyber scientist island you have to protect several layers and that means you need several technologies you cannot protect everything with one technology and we are coming in at the very last layer so to say we protect the code itself the software itself is it's culture-proofing so we have developed a tool um that enables the software to check itself at runtime if it has been compromised okay so if a hacker comes in he usually tries to change the code a little bit and then and then sees what happens and and our tool allows to implement um protection features at the binary level and that again allows the software check itself if it has been compromised and um this could be called the very last mile but actually you want to be called the very first smell so if a software engineer writes code that is very critical that goes in an industrial control system or into an airplane or into a pacemaker for instance then then he should protect the code and usually the engineers implement some kind of protection mostly some some kind of obfuscation okay but that is not enough so it really if you have critical pull it you want to prevent hacking lucky alternative for instance is another example you need real good protection that's where we come in so could train yeah cyber security is obviously a very hot space help us understand pricing are you priced in on a sas model monthly recurring fees uh so we saw uh as a license okay and what is that license tip i'm sure there's a big range but typically are we talking like a ten dollar license or ten thousand dollars it's a very high-end protection it's a very high-end product and it's um i cannot go into details uh but it's a six-figure number for the license okay and that's that's the annual license yes that's the annual license okay so always north of a hundred thousand dollars per year and and just help me um i won't i won't push further than that in terms of an average but why would someone pay a hundred thousand versus a million per year what are the big differences as they pay more so um you mean the uh i'm not quite sure if i understand the question someone who pays 100 000 is getting less than someone who's paying you a million per year what's the difference why would somebody pay you more money you you if you ask hundred thousand per year why would somebody pay you a million per year versus a hundred thousand per year this is a hundred thousand per year i know katrina my question is um someone who one customer pays a hundred thousand dollars per year the other pays a million per year why does the one paying a million per year pay you so much more why would you pay me a million dollars i'm not getting the question sorry i'm simply asking what allows you to charge more to some customers and less to other customers so because we have a very high-end product the um no but could train specifically sorry is it like number of seats on the platform a number of computers protected number of lines of code no it's per license used at the same time so when when a bunch of an engineer um uses it uh at a certain time frame and a second engineer wants to use that that's when we would pay uh two licenses so it's number of seats yes it's not sorry it's not yeah it's not per um um you know pro computer or per program it's number of seats sorry yes that's okay okay and then and then put this on a timeline for me when did you guys launch the company so we launched uh four years ago and uh we have which is quite some time and we have developed a prototype for a certain platform so we are platform depend dependent um we have uh initially originally wanted to go into um industrial control systems which you know the manufacturing which we of course they all go into the internet these days and that was a very uh important entry market it didn't turn out that way so we switched a little bit and are working on a um on other platforms which is the iot platform for arm as well as 664 uh which is more requested okay and i want to and i want to go a little bit into something else too so i said we are going for licenses but it's a very high-end product and um so what we usually have to do is we have to start with a service project with a small service project um and then because we are very it's also and you know if a big company comes to us and wants to protect their crown jewels there's a certain level of trust needed to and so we usually provide a service project first and then we go over and and they feel confidence you know finally charge for the service project or is it free if they get a contract no we do charge we do okay and is that typically like a hundred thousand dollars the same as a year-long contract or what's the typical set up it's smaller it depends really on the size of the project and that goes usually of the engineering hours okay engineering that's great and then you launch 2015 how many customers have you scaled to today how many people uh so we are very low in the customer number so it's still between one and five okay that's great so uh between well i mean we're already so close i mean you're talking like two three how many yeah two okay two that's great so two customers um paying again north of 100 grand per year you found it in 2015 how many people are on your team today we are just two two of you guys okay and we take if we need uh support b we go for consultant yep and how much have you guys raised are you bootstrapped no we are still bootstrapped so if you are a small startup in silicon valley today it's very hard to raise without any customer all right and um so we probably go start look into funding um but we have not right now we're still good stuff yes yep okay very good now what i mean how have you how have you been able to send yourself since back 2014 building this if today you just have two customers it's just a lot of consulting work uh yes consulting and i have a very good engineer actually who can go out of this way and and do that stuff okay so there's two of you guys yeah you and the engineer are you guys are you guys co-founders yes you're both co-founders yes so my engineer chris is the technical uh genius so you guys you guys split at 50 50 or he gave you more no actually i have a little bit less ah okay i'd give you more because i like you [Laughter] all right so good so you do that so when do you go all in on it sounds like to me right now you're kind of balancing because you need to for cash flow consulting work versus pure sass i think you have to pick one to really scale right if you had to pick consulting or sas which one will you go with yeah that is selling the license for sure yeah so why haven't you been able to sell more of those because it's it's very difficult and um to con all to work with the customer so first of all it's very hard to go to the big companies which we are targeting right again it's a trust very small company it's a it's a trust problem first and um the convincing against in cyber security because it's such a crazy field outside you really have to hard to target the right person and usually because we come in with such a high price we have to convince you know the very high levels ceo cesar but in the end it's the product manager who has actually to deal with the product right and the engineers and getting at the ceo level or at the very high level in the management that has to be behind is very complicated and i can actually give you a really nice example we had one company and we really had a big supporter in the company which i thought was great so he supported us he understood us he knew what what value we bring to the table and what was his title um what is his title i think it was product manager uh but but he really understood also what we bring to the table i think that that was really interesting he could very well very well with our engineer and uh so we did a little we did a project with them and they paid for it and um and he even told us how much should they pay they had i can't i'm not going to we're talking like twenty thirty forty thousand dollars it's that range yes okay yeah and um and and even the board at that company he was told is um they want to go more into the software so they have a product that is hardware and software and and i didn't even mention that what they want to protect is their algorithm and for the first time they want to export to a country that's famous for they take the ip and um china and they and they ex especially uh thought us...