REX has taken an embarring amount of time to finish. What was supposed to be a weekend project has become a full-blown service which is both super exciting but also super scary. For anyone that doesn't know, REX is created by the team at Digital Interruption to help left shift security but Digital Interruption isn't a software company; we're a security consultancy. One of the bigger issues we faced is trying to balance the two things.

Writing software is expensive and budget is always a problem for small companies. We were no exception. The approach we took in order to stay fully bootstrapped was to use penetration testing and security consultancy to fund our development into tools like REX, RAPTOR and PTERODACTYL, however with only so many hours in a day this meant we'd have to work twice as hard or release half as often which is far from ideal. This would only work for a short amount of time.

After initial development of the REX proof of concept between consultancy jobs (which wasn't easy in the beginning; some weeks I'd be pulling 60+ hours to get all the pen testing done as well as travelling around the world to meet clients!) we decided it was time to rethink how we'd handle innovation at Digital Interruption. Having a successful(ish) pen testing business meant two things for us:

1. Real world experience. Working with companies to improve security means we know what problems they're facing, and this helps us generate new products and innovations.
2. We have a regular source of income meaning until we outgrow it, we can invest back into our tool development.

By changing our mentality, we've turned our biggest hurdle (having to do both consultancy and products) into one of our greatest strengths. We've definitely changed how we do consultancy (for example Saskia now only has a couple of clients she works with) but getting to this point has been a slow process and one I wouldn't necessarily recommend to everyone. If you have a solid project idea and experience with managing software development teams, finding investment may be a better approach for quicker development, however bootstrapping worked well for us because we had previous skills to draw on.

Some key points to think about if you're starting a similar journey:

• Decide whether you want investment. It may be better if you're looking to release quickly or are happy to give up a % of the business for help.
• Don't ask people to work for free. If you don't get investment, you may need to bring in funds other ways.
• There are a lot of unexpected costs like branding and marketing that need to be considered. Think about how your income source will grow as the costs of products grow.