Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Wow. So, by this time you have spun out into a separate entity?

Christian Geyer: Not yet.

Sramana Mitra: Not yet. So, this $18.3 million is happening within, as a subdivision of the original company. Okay, and you’re probably making a lot more money than the original company, right?

Christian Geyer: Correct. We were about four to five times the original company.

So, the UK fiscal year for most of the companies is typically July to June. It’s not a calendar year like in the US. Their fiscal year, which aligns with government fiscal year, is July to June.

So, in our first eight months – October/November to June, revenue was $8.7 million, and that was a partial fiscal year. Then, in our first full fiscal year, which was July 2023 to June 2024, it was $18.3 million.

That’s when we earned our spin out. We were looking to align it with the fiscal year end date. For tax purposes, for government regulations, or for government filings in the UK, we settled on a July spin out date.

I would say probably the hardest thing was convincing and letting the shareholders know to let go of what was a rapidly growing business. At that point, they were looking at it going and probably thought that we accepted a minority stake in what was a rapidly growing business. We stuck to our guns, we stuck to the original deal, and they honored the original deal, and it was fantastic.

Sramana Mitra: So, you now have a bootstrapped business doing $18.3 million ARR?

Christian Geyer: It’s not an ARR business.

Sramana Mitra: That’s right. That’s right. It’s not an ARR business.

Christian Geyer: Correct. It’s not an ARR business. You would consider it recurring revenue because we deal with the same law firms and the same insurance carriers. They continue to bring us their insured clients who have been breached, and we respond to them referring.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not an ARR in the true sense of the word. Ok, got it.

Christian Geyer: No, exactly.

Sramana Mitra: That’s fine.

Christian Geyer: We work on whoever’s breached at the time. We look to get in and get out as fast as possible and get the client the report that helps them notify quickly.

There’s more to the story of why I founded it, how I founded it, but it really comes down to speed and the exposure that we have as consumers when these breaches happen.

The traditional method of how it was done leaves us exposed for sometimes upwards of a year, and we never know about it.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you a few questions that are really pertinent in this kind of a structure. We have a track within the 1Mby1M program called Bootstrapping Using a Paycheck. We actually encourage people to do this because people know about problems as they develop domain knowledge in a field. And cybersecurity, as you know, is a very complex field, and it’s only people who work in cybersecurity who actually see the problems, right? You can’t be from somewhere else and invent a cybersecurity problem. You have to have lived it somehow, somewhere. You have to have had exposure to cybersecurity problems by working somewhere relevant.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE
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