NS8, a cybersecurity startup and graduate of the Mach37 cybersecurity accelerator program, is focused on providing online storefronts with protection services in the areas of transaction fraud, advertising fraud, and website reliability and performance. Threats to online firms and their customers come in numerous forms – bots that disrupt payment processes, malicious code, and various forms of theft. Each negatively impacts a company, their activities, and their customers who look for confidence and trust in an online platform.
For online shops chargebacks and their fees, sale losses, cart abandonments, and advertising losses all erode sales, push customers away, and damage a firm’s reputation. For consumers, they don’t receive goods and services they seek and their trust in a technology process and platform evaporates. Globally, everyone loses.
Shrewdly, NS8 does not sell cybersecurity solutions to small and medium sized online businesses. Instead they frame their product portfolio and proactive solutions around significant everyday merchant pain points. Augmenting this approach is an ethos focused on ease of installation and use. This principle pervades all of their products. The goal is to make on-boarding their software into a firms’s website and existing processes as painless and transparent as possible. Overwhelmingly, companies are focused on and most knowledgeable about their customers needs, not online cybersecurity.
Instead of selling fear, using convoluted cybersecurity language, or forcing companies to invest significant bandwidth to understand the NS8 platform, they have created a series of solutions directed at well understood challenges and baked cybersecurity in without drawing attention to the way it is done. Thus, the conversation is directed at business challenges and solving them efficiently.
NS8 currently offers two free products – Visitors and Tracker – and two paid products – Performance, SSL & Reputation Monitoring and Complete Store Front Protection – providing a concise product ecosystem. Those online firms wanting to start small can do so and add more capabilities later, with all of the benefits of NS8s cyber platform built in from the ground up. Performance, SSL & Reputation Monitoring costs $10/month and Complete Store Front Protection works on a sliding scale – $100USD/month for 100K unique site hits, $200/month for 200K hits, $300/month for 300K hits, and $400/month for 1 million hits.
The technology platform underpinning their proactive security approach is evaluating domain name server (DNS) activity. DNS resolves a name – such as NS8.com – with an internet protocol (IP) address assigned to it. For NS8, they monitor 170 data points to unearth both potential malicious activity and real-time analytics and intelligence. Online firms can use this information to evaluate customer behavior based on a wealth of factors, quarantine potential fraudulent actions, protect their storefronts from attack, and provide current and prospective customers with confidence and trust. Combined with their DNS based approach are a set of APIs, an AI platform for handling structured and unstructured datasets, and an efficient method for managing SSL certificates.
Global online sales are expected to hit $2.5 trillion in 2018. Developed markets drive the online retail story, setting aside China and South Korea (South Korea is still officially defined as a developing market). But other markets – India, the Middle East, Africa, Central/South America – are rapidly embracing online retail. To date, NS8 has focused on platforms, such as Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, and others, to gain traction and grow. Currently, they have 10,000 customers using their free products and 800 utilizing their paid ones. Global expansion is the next step in the journey.
Not surprisingly, NS8 will be following platforms with which they have an existing relationship. However, creating relationships in new markets with additional platforms will be a high priority. Fewer comprehensive solutions exist to glean intelligence, provide actionable insight, detect fraud, and offer security. So, the team at NS8 is keen to make available all of their products to online companies and customers in these markets. Their November 2017 $7.5 million raise, led by Arbor Ventures, based in Hong Kong, reflects this push.
Given the broad online retail landscape for cybersecurity, protection, and analytics products and services, competitors abound. However, often these solutions don’t align with the needs of small to medium sized online companies. Firms, such as Human Presence Technology, do offer platform based applications to deal with fake accounts and spam. Others, such as Sucuri, provide comprehensive website security to provide detection, protection, backups, and performance services. These solutions are valuable, yet they do not get to the heart of the problems online retail firms face: a comprehensive focus on key pain points in a holistic way and a communication approach focused on important business values.
As a strategist, most compelling is their market understanding and the role cybersecurity plays as a source of differentiation. Effectively, NS8 does not talk about security. Instead, they focus on protection, fraud, and frictionless integration with existing business processes, all through a technology platform rooted in DNS discovery and AI. Their communication approach is revealing as well.
During my interview with founder and CEO, Adam Rogas, he assiduously reframed several of my cybersecurity questions into customer business challenges. Not once during our conversation did he use typical cybersecurity language. This spirit is easy to see on their website as well, under NS8U, their industry education section, where they highlight key challenge areas in the online retail space. It’s a savvy addition too few cybersecurity startups take the time to develop and share with important stakeholders and key markets at large.
Their decision to follow platforms – Shopify, BigCommerce, Thirty Bees – into new markets seems an obvious choice to build traction, learn market nuances, keep their customer on-boarding virtually frictionless, and scale with limited resources. NS8 is now employs forty-one people, up from eleven in January 2018.
Key challenges for NS8 include some classics: preserving the company culture, finding the right talent, sharing the founder/co-founder brain trust, and scaling by making processes repeatable. Critically, the firm does not hire for function. Despite the strain, NS8 always hires for talent and trains as needed. I could not agree more. This approach to human capital development is often a cause of significant frustration, but is essential for success to remain sustainable.
I look forward to watching how NS8 grows over the next eighteen months and getting back in touch for an update on their progress.
Stay tuned.
