How to solve the problem of making security decisions

While in university, my brother and I spent hundreds of hours on various projects and concepts. We had a strong desire to build a product that would impact the world and the drive to see it built! Solving problems is something that we love to do. When we identify a problem in any sphere, we become hyper-focused on solving it. We discuss, brainstorm, and ideate. We talk with other’s to get their perspective, helping us refine our concept and solution. This led us to create and explore many prototypes.

One of those ideas that we explored extensively was a tool that would automatically create individualized curriculum plans for each student. It would pull curriculum from various databases and would allow for teachers to track student progress. We wanted to solve the problem of students being passed over because of how much a teacher needs to manage in a classroom. After performing extensive market research and talking with instructors, we realized our ideas would need to pass through some huge legal hurdles. We dropped the project.

One day, my brother came to me and was telling me about how frustrating it was at work. He’s a security engineer by trade and was trying to build attack trees for his company. His team wanted to assess high-priority areas for the team to invest resources into. They also wanted to be able to demonstrate their value to their leaders.

The problem was that there wasn’t any good solution for his team! Either every out-of-the-box solution was incredibly expensive and time consuming, or it was an open-source solution that would require dev time to do what he needed. After a long discussion and many questions on my part, we came to a conclusion: we should build the software his team needed.

The more we dug into the problem, the deeper the problem became. We spent months researching and planning. We spent months more designing and iterating on the concept. Inevitably, we felt like our idea would work and we began the arduous process of building the solution from the ground up.

So how do we solve the problem his team had? How do we help others make economic security decisions? We needed to build a tool that would be quick to learn, fast to setup, affordable for teams, and made managing the complex simple.

After countless iterations, long nights and long weekends, RiskyTrees is nearly ready to launch and be used. We are so excited to bring this tool to the market and to solve a problem that desperately needs to be solved: helping organizations make economic security decisions.