Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much did get paid by this customer that gave you the first use case?

Christian Geyer: I believe it was $300,000.

Sramana Mitra: And this $300,000 came into the original company?

Christian Geyer: Yes. That $300,000 was delivered in five days, honestly, because I automated the solution in a way it was almost entirely profit. We were able to push it back to the parent company. We were able to fund our payroll for several months and keep everyone employed in the parent company.

Now, I guess from there, we shut down that business offering, and the board of directors said, “Halt all operations. We now have four months of payroll in house. We don’t really need your offering anymore. So, shut it down for now.” I shut it off completely.

Sramana Mitra: Shut what off?

Christian Geyer: Shut actual ACTFORE off, shut the incident response side of the business, the one that I was working from 6PM to 6AM.

Sramana Mitra: Why?

Christian Geyer: It was a constant fight. You’ve to think that they’ve invested twenty plus years into the business. They’ve poured countless pounds or dollars into the business to then grow it to develop its software. They didn’t want us completely distracted by it.

So there’s a lot of story, and I know I’m kind of going all over the place, but when you look at the trajectory of the business, we delivered our first deal. It gave the parent company four months of payroll in their cashflow. Then we could maybe make a run at rebounding from Covid.

Sramana Mitra: This $300,000 paid for the entire company’s payroll?

Christian Geyer: Yes. We were very small at the time. We’d laid off a number of employees and furloughed a lot. To get through Covid, we’re going down to almost bare minimum staff.

Sramana Mitra: What year was this?

Christian Geyer: That was 2021.

Sramana Mitra: 2021, okay. So, it was in the middle of Covid; Covid is raging at this point.

Christian Geyer: Yes, Covid is raging. It was in the summer of 2021 that we ran out of working capital to make payroll, and I went off and showed the proof of concept. We brought in this deal. It was $300,000 that went right to pretty much our bottom line. It funded payroll for another roughly four or five months.

What it did was it got us through to another capital raise. So, we ended up raising capital in December of 2021, which then brought in another two million pounds.

Sramana Mitra: That two million pounds was to build this new business or build the old business?

Christian Geyer: Build the old business, and keep it running. Their focus has been on the core business for 20 years. So, they didn’t want to pull the plug, and they needed to also show confidence in it. The investors had to put money into it, or else it would’ve continued after four months of the cash flow that we had raised in the original offering, it would’ve gone away and the business would’ve failed.

Well, we’re not going to let 20 plus years of investment and funds fail. The current ownership reached into their pockets. Then we also went out and brought in new investors and raised just over two million pounds and brought it into the business to then give us additional cash flow.

At the time, I was pushing pretty hard that let me do this, that I showed you that we could bring in $300,000. Let me show you that I can bring in a lot more. I can turn this into a $100 million business. Just like we had built the Crypsis group back in 2016 for its sale in 2020 for $260 million, I could do something similar.

So, after a lot of back and forth of letting me do it, what does it mean to the business? We’d lose our COO, we’d lose our CFO if I were to focus on that. At the time, we were such a small group that I convinced them that there wasn’t an immediate need for a CFO and COO at that time.

In March 2022, deals started flooding in. We probably had month over month of $300,000 to $500,000. After a few months, we brought in roughly about $2 million in six months. We used some of that fund to do an official launch campaign.

Then I rebranded our offering as ACTFORE active forensics and did a launch in October Of 2022 under our official name. Immediately, we jumped to a million dollars in revenue in our first month out under the new name.

It was month over month million-dollar months of revenue. That’s when we closed our first partial fiscal year. We were months into the business, officially titled ACTFORE. We closed at just under $9 million or $8.7 million in our first year. Probably a year later, we did our first complete fiscal year at $18.3 million.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE
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