I spent quite a bit of time thinking about a security startup of my own recently and talked to a single investor about it. The wisdom seems to be that the consumer market for security products is a pretty hard one to be in. You can probably make some amount of money as AV & Password managers show, and there are business models that make money on the backend through data, but the prices people are willing to pay are pretty low and you're battling against whatever your customer acquisition cost is.
Personally, I threw out my thoughts of doing anything in the consumer space after writing down some basic numbers of what revenue, customer acquisition cost, etc would have to look like for me to consider it a success. The enterprise space seems a lot easier since I work as a security engineer and have a lot of contacts in the field, but I can see how it would be a lot harder without it. But if the tech is good you should be able to convince someone with connections to come on board and help you sell.
I don't think having an enterprise offering necessarily precludes having a consumer version (enterprises need mgmt features and are generally willing to pay), though it will obviously not be the focus of your company and your tech may morph over time as you align yourself closer with enterprises, but unless you're willing to spend money up front on customer acquisition and charge the customers more than that, you're always going to just be subsidising a free version that most people don't really know about and your real focus will be elsewhere.
I put an email in my profile if you want to talk about it at more length.
Personally, I threw out my thoughts of doing anything in the consumer space after writing down some basic numbers of what revenue, customer acquisition cost, etc would have to look like for me to consider it a success. The enterprise space seems a lot easier since I work as a security engineer and have a lot of contacts in the field, but I can see how it would be a lot harder without it. But if the tech is good you should be able to convince someone with connections to come on board and help you sell.
I don't think having an enterprise offering necessarily precludes having a consumer version (enterprises need mgmt features and are generally willing to pay), though it will obviously not be the focus of your company and your tech may morph over time as you align yourself closer with enterprises, but unless you're willing to spend money up front on customer acquisition and charge the customers more than that, you're always going to just be subsidising a free version that most people don't really know about and your real focus will be elsewhere.
I put an email in my profile if you want to talk about it at more length.