Comment by cleverfoo

> Impressive! What do you think it is that you do that allows you to compete with VirusTotal, and even free tools like Jotti?

Thanks and good question. We don't really compete with virus total since it's more of a research tool and, for a while, their terms explicitly prohibited commercial use (but I think that has changed). Jotti is a similar thing, more of a research tool than a high performance API you can use to build commercial products on.

> Presumably you're now using commercial AV tools, rather than Clam? Did you have to get some kind of special license from them to use it like this?

Yeah the product has expended a bunch over the years and we use multiple detection engines [2] to catch all kinds of unsafe content. But you are right, we do license a commercial AV engine to act as a backup to our own to ensure best possible detection rates. The licensing process warrants a blog post of its own since it's not what I would call easy.

[2] https://docs.scanii.com/article/149-how-do-the-different-det...

> Congratulations on your success!

That is very kind of you, thank you.

> What did "getting it out there" consist of for you? How did you get it out there in the beginning?

For Scanii in particular, the original product was a thin wrapper around an open source AV engine, a hacked on a weekend UX, and a credit card processing integration to collect payment - the very minimal needed to find out if _anyone_ was willing to pay for this service.

With that said, what worked for me in this case is not what I would focus here since it depends on what kind of business you are trying to build. What I do believe is important is focusing on the economics of your space which, for IT, is all about productivity or, more succinctly, saving people's time - they pay you X for something that could cost them, in terms of people's time, Y to do.

So, what you want to ask yourself is whether signing up, paying and onboarding onto your product (the X in the equation above) is significantly lower than the next best alternative, either doing the same on a competitor product or building something themselves - the Y above.

For scanii, even at launch it saved people lots of time managing and operating malware detection engines which are cumbersome and hard to keep up to date. I had a feeling that would be the case when I launched but I couldn't be sure until our first customer voted with their credit card.