CodeGuard, a startup that launched at TechCrunch Disrupt last week, has already raised a round of funding. The company has just announced a $500,000 round from Imlay Investments.
CodeGuard, which was the audience choice winner from Startup Alley, helps protect and monitor websites from attacks and data thefts. The startup provides a virtual version control system and stores site data in the cloud. Backups are stored hourly or daily, allowing users to see what files have changed. If there is a hack or suspicious change in data, webmasters can quickly revert to the last known “clean” version.
And hacking can be identified and site owners can be notified before they spread malware, have their links pirated, or act as a parasitic host for spammers. As we wrote in our initial review of CodeGuard, the service is similar to the Time Machine feature built into the Apple OS X software; except CodeGuard backsup data found on a server elsewhere. And the product is designed to allow owners with little technical experience to manage and monitor their websites.
You can watch CodeGuard’s demo from TechCrunch Disrupt below:
they really appreciated it, and
we’re happy just to be
here and to be on the
stage with all these very disruptive companies doing cool things.
So, thanks.
So, I’ll tell you about CodeGuard and I’ll keep it super quick.
We are a time machine for your website.
So if you have
a PC and you’re not sure
what time machine is then ask a
person to your left or right whose using a Mac and they can tell you.
And so I’ll tell you how we interact with websites to do this.
So what we do is, we back up your site.
Right now we use FTP or
SFTP and we’re working on
cPanel and and Plus plug-ins to make it super easy.
But right now you have to
enter in your FTP credentials and
we take up an initial backup or snap shot.
Then we monitor your code for
changes, either every hour or every day.
And if we find any changes we’ll update your repository and take a new snapshot.
And lastly, we offer
the ability to undo any changes if you need to.
So this is really the key to
the value proposition in that, if
anything happens to your site,
whether it was wanted or unwanted,
that you want to revert you could
do with just one button So
now I’m going to show
you guys the way the site looks.
This is our web site,
and it’s super easy to get started.
This is codeguard.com.
Ok, it’s up there.
You just click get started,
and you create your account and we’re
offering five-thousand spots for
our public beta, so once those are gone, we ‘ll just have to cut it.
The code you can
use is capital TCD, and you
can create an account, and
once you create an account, then you can add your web site.
This is what it looks like after you’ve added your web site.
So you can see each
version, and the thing
that’s unique about our versions is that they contain information.
We don’t just take a daily snapshot,
we only take a back up if something is changed on your site.
You can look in, and I can see, well nothing’s changed on my sight.
That’s fine, and if I
wanna look at the changes, I can click on changes.
And then I’ll show you how
monitoring is configured, and we’ll conclude our presentation.
For monitoring, I can choose
here whether I want to have
it monitor daily, hourly or
whenever, and then I
can tell what I want it
to do ifif it notices
anything is different.
So the reason this is important
is, if I’m going on vacation
for two weeks and I have
an AdWords campaign running and I’m
not going to do anything to
my website, I want to make
sure if it notices anything
is different, I want it to
repair by pushing the last version.
And that means that if Google
puts me on a blacklist,
my site’s not going
to drop on the page rankings while
I’m gone, because very quickly once
it notices there’s a
change it’s going to revert and then any malware on my site will be gone.
So with that, I’ll
go back to the conclusion of our presentation.
We consider ourselves website protection for the rest of us.
Our systems is built upon Git, developed by Linus Torvalds.
It’s an industry-leading source version
control tool, but we provide it for the masses.
It’s as easy as getting started
by adding your site, connecting to CodeGuard and then we do the rest.
That’s it.
That’s playing golf.
Alright, questions or comments for
CodeGuard, Shana?
It is an enterprise self serve
model, that’s the idea you want?
It is an enterprise self serve?
I mean you want people to sign up
themselves, no enterprise sales people.
So, we’re targeting right now
small and medium businesses, because–I
want to make sure I understand
your question–the Fortune 500 and above,
they have complicated web IT
people that are as sophisticated
as those in the audience, that are
using Git and other tools to do this.
So we’re targeting the small to
medium businesses and bloggers who now can’t do it on their own at all.
So trying to take an industry-leading tool and bring it to the masses.
I guess I don’t understand.
This is for people who
run their websites on which kinds of publishing platforms?
Does it only work with certain
CMS’s or publishing platforms, or?
That’s a great question.
So we’ve developed our initial
MVP to work with
static sites because we wanted
to get that down and really get down to monitoring the source code.
And now we’re working on
rolling out with essentially all
CMS platforms, but doing it on a one-by-one basis.
So we are starting with WordPress.
Static sites means you’re just
crawling the page, you don’t
need to have anything connected to the server, or?
We FTP all the sites right now.
And for the static sites our
solution right now We don’t have
a database component but lets say we take Word Press.
If you have Word Press database backup
plugin installed, It will drop
your database next to your source code and we back every thing up.
So we started, we want
to start with something where we could
be very sure we had a solution that worked.
So, we started with the
static sites and just the
source code and now we’re planning
on moving towards the database portion.
So in the next two weeks, we will have our own database plugin.
How many sizes is
this working on currently?
Right now we soft launch and
we transition some of our private beta users.
We maybe have 60 sites in the system right now.
And what’s the, how do you plan to charge with this?
I’m sorry?
How do you plan to charge?
Right now it’s free
if your site is 250MB or less
and if you want to
manage multiple sites or your
site is up to a
gigabyte, so above 250MB is $10 a month.
And we have our
agency plan if you are lager than a gigabyte.
And how do you intend to distribute?
Our distribution plan is sort
of twofold, so right nowsparring
customers on a one off
basis, just to gain traction
and get information about which features
to develop and pour our time and energy to.
And then at same time I am working with hosting providers.
There is a company called A
Small Orange, and the CEO
of that company sits on our board of advisers.
And I’ve been specking out the Cpanel plugin with them.
And I have several other hosting providers lined up.
And our goal is to work with them on revenue share agreements.
Because they like us one, for
revenue share, and also to reduce their technical support costs.
Because customers can trouble shoot
problems themselves rather than call
them and require them to spend time and energy of the customers.
Jim?
What, so this sell
some kind of insurance policy to people?
Because typically once they’re
hacked they wish to have
been using you but its too late.
So how did you sort of market yourself?
That’s a great question.
I had someone in my office a
week ago, he said down
and would not let me leave until he backed up his site.
Because his wife’s law firm site had been hacked.
And I tried to leave to go to lunch.
He said, “No, you are staying here until our site loaded in your system.”
So you may have a great point in that.
Someone who has experience the problem feels the pain.
say that someone who has and has not.
And I think our challenge there
is to work with hosting provider to
market it in the right way and
we think that if it comes
from a hosting provider and it’s
marketed the right way and awareness growth in the community.
So if you look 10 years ago, who
was using Carbonite and Mozy,
they didn’t exist, because no one
was aware that laptop failure,computer failure was an issue.
It is great point.
I think we’ll have to leverage influentials,as
well as really fine tune
our marketing to really roll it out the right way.
Can you make money,
I assume you then have to pay
a commission that’s resonably substantial to the hosting provider.
How does your marginal structure
support going to
market mainly as a web share basis kind of thing?
Absolutely!
The question about how we are
going to monetise, and specifically with our revenue share partnership.
It is all predicated upon storage cost going to nearly nothing.
And that is the reason we
can offer Code Guard today as opposed to five years ago.
Because storage costs are so
low we can offer
a very healthy margin to
the hosting providers and it still makes sense.
Because our customer acquisition cost.while
it’s going through an aggregation channel is very very minimal.
I mean, that’s the challenge, I think, in the small and medium business market.
If I have to go out and acquire
each customer and in a
disaggregated fashion, it’s going
to cost me a ton, which
is X is greater than
Y and Y is the
cost to go through the aggregator
or maybe the rep share that I give to them.
And what is your current back end?
What are you using for storage?
That’s another good question.
Right now, we just have a
dedicated server and the
goal was, rather than build
a site that can handle a
million users, that’s a happy problem to have.
We’ll build a system that can
handle five thousand users, should
we be in the advantageous position that we get there.
Then we’ll put some more
money toward scaling the back end.
So we have a system that works
very well for a 5000-site,
that we’ll close our data off
at, and then should we
get to the 5000 and our investors
are happy and think that’s the
direction we want to go, we’ll invest to allow us to scale from the back end perspective.
So you ‘ll manage your own architecture; you’ll manage your own servers.
You’ll have your own rack.
You’re not going to sub this out.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I think there are some benefits to the cloud and you have to really think.
smart about it, but there’s
a number of influential and thought
leaders that I think, would
agree for a product
like this while Cloud is
a great options we can do that in ours .
Ok.
We are going to wrap it up.
That’s the CodeGuard everyone.
Thanks guys.
That’s our startup of our
audience’s choice so well then who voted for them .Ok,
that’s end of the todays session .
Thank you all for staying.
we’re happy just to be
here and to be on the
stage with all these very disruptive companies doing cool things.
So, thanks.
So, I’ll tell you about CodeGuard and I’ll keep it super quick.
We are a time machine for your website.
So if you have
a PC and you’re not sure
what time machine is then ask a
person to your left or right whose using a Mac and they can tell you.
And so I’ll tell you how we interact with websites to do this.
So what we do is, we back up your site.
Right now we use FTP or
SFTP and we’re working on
cPanel and and Plus plug-ins to make it super easy.
But right now you have to
enter in your FTP credentials and
we take up an initial backup or snap shot.
Then we monitor your code for
changes, either every hour or every day.
And if we find any changes we’ll update your repository and take a new snapshot.
And lastly, we offer
the ability to undo any changes if you need to.
So this is really the key to
the value proposition in that, if
anything happens to your site,
whether it was wanted or unwanted,
that you want to revert you could
do with just one button So
now I’m going to show
you guys the way the site looks.
This is our web site,
and it’s super easy to get started.
This is codeguard.com.
Ok, it’s up there.
You just click get started,
and you create your account and we’re
offering five-thousand spots for
our public beta, so once those are gone, we ‘ll just have to cut it.
The code you can
use is capital TCD, and you
can create an account, and
once you create an account, then you can add your web site.
This is what it looks like after you’ve added your web site.
So you can see each
version, and the thing
that’s unique about our versions is that they contain information.
We don’t just take a daily snapshot,
we only take a back up if something is changed on your site.
You can look in, and I can see, well nothing’s changed on my sight.
That’s fine, and if I
wanna look at the changes, I can click on changes.
And then I’ll show you how
monitoring is configured, and we’ll conclude our presentation.
For monitoring, I can choose
here whether I want to have
it monitor daily, hourly or
whenever, and then I
can tell what I want it
to do ifif it notices
anything is different.
So the reason this is important
is, if I’m going on vacation
for two weeks and I have
an AdWords campaign running and I’m
not going to do anything to
my website, I want to make
sure if it notices anything
is different, I want it to
repair by pushing the last version.
And that means that if Google
puts me on a blacklist,
my site’s not going
to drop on the page rankings while
I’m gone, because very quickly once
it notices there’s a
change it’s going to revert and then any malware on my site will be gone.
So with that, I’ll
go back to the conclusion of our presentation.
We consider ourselves website protection for the rest of us.
Our systems is built upon Git, developed by Linus Torvalds.
It’s an industry-leading source version
control tool, but we provide it for the masses.
It’s as easy as getting started
by adding your site, connecting to CodeGuard and then we do the rest.
That’s it.
That’s playing golf.
Alright, questions or comments for
CodeGuard, Shana?
It is an enterprise self serve
model, that’s the idea you want?
It is an enterprise self serve?
I mean you want people to sign up
themselves, no enterprise sales people.
So, we’re targeting right now
small and medium businesses, because–I
want to make sure I understand
your question–the Fortune 500 and above,
they have complicated web IT
people that are as sophisticated
as those in the audience, that are
using Git and other tools to do this.
So we’re targeting the small to
medium businesses and bloggers who now can’t do it on their own at all.
So trying to take an industry-leading tool and bring it to the masses.
I guess I don’t understand.
This is for people who
run their websites on which kinds of publishing platforms?
Does it only work with certain
CMS’s or publishing platforms, or?
That’s a great question.
So we’ve developed our initial
MVP to work with
static sites because we wanted
to get that down and really get down to monitoring the source code.
And now we’re working on
rolling out with essentially all
CMS platforms, but doing it on a one-by-one basis.
So we are starting with WordPress.
Static sites means you’re just
crawling the page, you don’t
need to have anything connected to the server, or?
We FTP all the sites right now.
And for the static sites our
solution right now We don’t have
a database component but lets say we take Word Press.
If you have Word Press database backup
plugin installed, It will drop
your database next to your source code and we back every thing up.
So we started, we want
to start with something where we could
be very sure we had a solution that worked.
So, we started with the
static sites and just the
source code and now we’re planning
on moving towards the database portion.
So in the next two weeks, we will have our own database plugin.
How many sizes is
this working on currently?
Right now we soft launch and
we transition some of our private beta users.
We maybe have 60 sites in the system right now.
And what’s the, how do you plan to charge with this?
I’m sorry?
How do you plan to charge?
Right now it’s free
if your site is 250MB or less
and if you want to
manage multiple sites or your
site is up to a
gigabyte, so above 250MB is $10 a month.
And we have our
agency plan if you are lager than a gigabyte.
And how do you intend to distribute?
Our distribution plan is sort
of twofold, so right nowsparring
customers on a one off
basis, just to gain traction
and get information about which features
to develop and pour our time and energy to.
And then at same time I am working with hosting providers.
There is a company called A
Small Orange, and the CEO
of that company sits on our board of advisers.
And I’ve been specking out the Cpanel plugin with them.
And I have several other hosting providers lined up.
And our goal is to work with them on revenue share agreements.
Because they like us one, for
revenue share, and also to reduce their technical support costs.
Because customers can trouble shoot
problems themselves rather than call
them and require them to spend time and energy of the customers.
Jim?
What, so this sell
some kind of insurance policy to people?
Because typically once they’re
hacked they wish to have
been using you but its too late.
So how did you sort of market yourself?
That’s a great question.
I had someone in my office a
week ago, he said down
and would not let me leave until he backed up his site.
Because his wife’s law firm site had been hacked.
And I tried to leave to go to lunch.
He said, “No, you are staying here until our site loaded in your system.”
So you may have a great point in that.
Someone who has experience the problem feels the pain.
say that someone who has and has not.
And I think our challenge there
is to work with hosting provider to
market it in the right way and
we think that if it comes
from a hosting provider and it’s
marketed the right way and awareness growth in the community.
So if you look 10 years ago, who
was using Carbonite and Mozy,
they didn’t exist, because no one
was aware that laptop failure,computer failure was an issue.
It is great point.
I think we’ll have to leverage influentials,as
well as really fine tune
our marketing to really roll it out the right way.
Can you make money,
I assume you then have to pay
a commission that’s resonably substantial to the hosting provider.
How does your marginal structure
support going to
market mainly as a web share basis kind of thing?
Absolutely!
The question about how we are
going to monetise, and specifically with our revenue share partnership.
It is all predicated upon storage cost going to nearly nothing.
And that is the reason we
can offer Code Guard today as opposed to five years ago.
Because storage costs are so
low we can offer
a very healthy margin to
the hosting providers and it still makes sense.
Because our customer acquisition cost.while
it’s going through an aggregation channel is very very minimal.
I mean, that’s the challenge, I think, in the small and medium business market.
If I have to go out and acquire
each customer and in a
disaggregated fashion, it’s going
to cost me a ton, which
is X is greater than
Y and Y is the
cost to go through the aggregator
or maybe the rep share that I give to them.
And what is your current back end?
What are you using for storage?
That’s another good question.
Right now, we just have a
dedicated server and the
goal was, rather than build
a site that can handle a
million users, that’s a happy problem to have.
We’ll build a system that can
handle five thousand users, should
we be in the advantageous position that we get there.
Then we’ll put some more
money toward scaling the back end.
So we have a system that works
very well for a 5000-site,
that we’ll close our data off
at, and then should we
get to the 5000 and our investors
are happy and think that’s the
direction we want to go, we’ll invest to allow us to scale from the back end perspective.
So you ‘ll manage your own architecture; you’ll manage your own servers.
You’ll have your own rack.
You’re not going to sub this out.
Absolutely, absolutely.
I think there are some benefits to the cloud and you have to really think.
smart about it, but there’s
a number of influential and thought
leaders that I think, would
agree for a product
like this while Cloud is
a great options we can do that in ours .
Ok.
We are going to wrap it up.
That’s the CodeGuard everyone.
Thanks guys.
That’s our startup of our
audience’s choice so well then who voted for them .Ok,
that’s end of the todays session .
Thank you all for staying.
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