Transcript
Narrator:
Welcome to 9 0 9 Exec, your source for wit and wisdom in cybersecurity and beyond. On this podcast, your host, veteran chief security officer at Cyber Aficionado Den Jones taps his vast network to bring you guests, stories, opinions, predictions and analysis you won't get anywhere else. Join us for 9 0 9 exec, episode 35 with Simon Wijckmans.
Den:
Alright folks, welcome to another episode of nine nine Exec, your podcast that covers executives, their journey. And every episode we'll try and bring some guests with some wit & wisdom and ideally with a fascinating journey. And today is like no other. We have a founder, a CEO of a new company. I'm going to say it's new because it's new to me. So CSide is the company, Simon Wijckmans, welcome to the show. And why don't just give us a quick introduction before we dig into the meat and potatoes.
Simon:
I must say the word executive is still something funny to get used to. Makes me sound a lot older, doesn't it? It's got like an anti anti-aging effect, a bit like joining a consultancy firm. Well, so nice to meet you. I'm Simon. I'm the founder, CEO of C side. I started a company about a year and a half ago now in January of 2024. The thing is, I've been in web security for a while before that and I went from solution architect to product. I did a lot of under attack onboardings and I realized there was a gap in how web security was done. We spent a lot of money to protect our infrastructure and the parameter around that, mostly using web application firewalls and that kind of stuff. We spend a lot of money checking open source dependencies that we use in our code for malicious behaviors that can happen on either the developer's devices or on our servers.
But if you ask a developer, you really know what's happening in the browser of your user when they load a webpage. Well, the answer to that is no. And the problem is that the developer itself, even if they were to manage all the code, would say no, but it's worse in the sense that the developer is held responsible for that even though they're not often the people that are full control over it. The marketing people want to add a tool. The legal team needs this. Some campaign is happening, they're working within the agency. They're asking to add Google tag managers so they can put anything into that website and guess what bad actors know. You have no visibility there. So there's a lot of issues in that space. There's a lot of compliance requirements being updated in that space as well because at the end of the day, people that are malicious actors online are not dumb. They realize where people are being checked and where they're not, and they're going to be more where you're not getting checked. Yeah,
Den:
Yeah. Awesome. So we'll dig into the whole seaside business shortly so I can detect an accent. So when we met in our prepped call, I naively, because I'm European, I naively thought Holland, but you said no. So why do you explain where you grew up and where you are now and what brought you here?
Simon:
Close enough is my answer to when people say that I'm originally from Belgium. I was born there once and I didn't do anything for that is usually my joke. So it's just happened. I was brought up, I would say in a rather direct culture, so I think I out directed the Dutch as well, so I can see people thinking that's a bit of a thing. We basically speak the same language, just slight differences, but it's more or less like a dialect, which is not that substantial anyway, and then when I was 18, I moved away from Belgium, moved to Dublin. I was already at Microsoft for about two years at the time. So at 16 I was working for them as a contractor and then moved to Dublin at the age of 18 where I lived for about two years. Went back to Belgium. That was a bit of a mistake, didn't really like it. They're too small of a country and then kind of fell in London. I love with London. So I moved to London. I lived there for six years and only recently moved to San Francisco. That's where I think my career took the biggest jump and then started Seaside from there. Did our first basically year of heads down work from there as well, and then relocated to San Francisco.
Den:
So the move to San Francisco, was that with a company that brought you over here or was that you saying, I'm going to need to start my company? So San Francisco is where I want to be at.
Simon:
CSide was always a US company. So when I started in January last year, I realized that there was no real benefit in trying to start it from somewhere else and then having to do what's called a Delaware flip in some countries moving it from a UK company to a US company, it was just added overhead. I realized that what we were doing, we would have to be US company in some form or another in the future anyway, so I just incorporated as a US company and then eventually after a year of actually being able to heads down work with my team, then you get to the point where you realize that as a founder, you're not doing the business or anybody involved in it any favors. By sticking around in Europe, you got to realize that the people that can help you build this business to the next phase are here. Here is where the experienced people are that have actually done this and where the capital is and where a lot of the customers are as well to an extent, although I must say San Francisco itself, the customer base is a little different, but the risk tolerance in the US is also different. So we've always had to portray ourself as a US startup because we were, even though the team is very distributed, we are literally anywhere in the world.
Den:
And this is your first company as in your first founded, or did you run other companies before that you don't want to tell us about?
Simon:
Well, I did a bunch of little startup projects and site thingies and this and that. And I mean, as a kid, when I was way too young to even legally own my own business, I got my parents to sign for a business where I rented out Microsoft Connect sensors that I was able to get earlier than they were available on market in Belgium. You could get them in some countries and I shipped them in and then I had them for event rentals and stuff like that. I did all types of huy techy things
Den:
At
Simon:
Some point. It's actually funny what's kind of a career you should really not go into as a kid because it becomes a really difficult thing to manage in the long term. But yeah, I did a lot of network installations in Belgium, stuff for small medium businesses. Most of them still running and when they have an issue, they still come to me, even though I told them, don't talk to me, talk to someone else.
Den:
Yeah. Well, it's funny because I remember in Scotland, so I grew up in Scotland and I moved to the US in 2001 before moving to the us I was always helping people build computers and all sorts of stupid shit like you right side hustle. And then when I moved here I figured, okay, I don't want to get caught in that trap. So I'm moving to California if I meet people and they say, what do you do? Just so they don't ask me to fix their damn computer, I'm going to tell them I'm an loo repair guy. So I get to the sunniest place in the planet and they're like, what do you do for work? I'm like, well, I'm currently unemployed because I'm a loo repairman and there's not much need for it over here. And people would be like, what the fuck? And I'm like, yeah, well, whatever. So yeah. So I got caught in that little hustle trap in Scotland as well. So let's talk about life as a founder. This is really your first big endeavor. You've recently had funding. I want to get to the funding conversation, but before we get there, can you share a little bit about what surprised you the most pleasantly as you're starting your company? And then we'll get to the and what shocked you the most?
Simon:
Yeah, so I mean the founding story of Seaside, it's pretty straightforward. I used to work in this space. I realized that the competitors and even the solution that I inherited couldn't work by design and that nobody was doing it properly because it took a lot of effort. And then I realized that look, I mean, it takes a lot of effort to do it. People are still paying for solutions that by design you can't really solve this problem. And if this problem continues to grow, then eventually there's going to have to be a better solution to it. I mean, the pain tolerance was quite high at the time. And so yeah, I kind of shelved it. Did another thing for a bit, and then I mean, yeah, I worked at a very small startup and then I started speaking to some people that I knew in the venture space that I was introduced to by people that I worked with and then just casually networked. And then one day I was like, look, this is something that I might actually want to work on. And then they were like, okay, sounds like a pretty good idea. What do you want to do now? I said, I don't know, I still have a job. And then one thing led to another, first check came in, then I had to quit my job, start a company, the whole thing. So it was a funding first quit the job and start a company later situation started. Oh, that's fine.
Den:
So for you, the first trick was networking and socializing the idea and then at some 0.1 of the VCs has said, oh yeah, that sounds good.
Simon:
Exactly. I mean, at the end of the day, I wasn't new to this space. I understood this very well. I understood the pitfalls of it. I understood the things that worked and it didn't, and that was one of the things that they, of course, people look for conviction and that gave conviction. I think a big thing to recognize is when you work for startups or companies that are mostly San Francisco based throughout your career, I mean I moved away from Microsoft, joined CloudFlare, joined Versal, joined another startup. After you start building your network here, whether you like it or not, you're building a bit of a brand around you. And so then when it gets to the point that you may want to start your own company, the network of people that they can back you against that they know someone that knows you is quite large.
And the result of that is that it's easier to raise funding. I was really lucky in doing that. It wasn't necessarily a conscious thing that I did throughout my career. I did do other things that were conscious going from big company to small company, all that kind of stuff. But I never really had to dig box that said it has to be a San Francisco based startup or startup or a company that grew from San Francisco. That wasn't necessarily a hard requirement. Turned out that that ended up that way Anyway, and then I got lucky because at the end, that gave me a lot of, made it easier for me to get the company from the ground up, things that I liked that I was positively impressed by. Look, I mean this space is not that big in San Francisco. A lot of people know a lot of people and they're all very happy to help if you come into it, right? Intros, cold arm bowing to people, no way does not work. 2025, I get absolutely spam hammered every day. It's really annoying. I don't respond to any of it. It's not even with any bad intentions, just I don't respond to any of it. I don't have time for it. If somebody that I trust and emails me saying, you should talk to this person, of course I will.
That's the thing. And so here, just by being here, that is a big benefit.
Things that surprised me in the less positive sense, jealousy in Europe, the culture of jealousy. When I announced our funding, some European media also jumped on it, and I entertained that for a few reasons. So first things first, I hope that at some point there's going to be another Simon in Belgium that sees these things and thinks, okay, it is actually doable. I've got goals that are achievable. That's one part. The other part is I've got family there, it's nice for them. There's maybe a little bit of grit in there as well. A little chip on my shoulder that wants to take these asshole teachers that I had in high school and primary school that were absolute French assholes to me and just show them like, look, you are wrong. I'm doing what I can. I'm actually trying to have a global impact for Rotten Hill. Anyway, that was the other element. The thing is it also caused a lot of people to be quite jealous, and that is something that I don't like. I never looked at somebody's successes, something that I'm jealous of. I admire it. It doesn't trigger the emotion of jealousy.
I don't get why that is a thing. In many European environments, that's what can here.
Den:
It is funny, I grew up in Scotland and very similar, right? I mean, I'm getting two different experiences. One was in the nineties, I was in the rave scene, write music, working for record labels, and that was my part-time fun hustle when I was 22. But what I realized in the scene was everyone was just bitching and bitching, and anytime someone got any hint of success, then everyone was just slating them and giving them shit. And I just kind of thought, this is such a negative environment. Then when I moved here to the US I was pretty successful. I'm posting stuff on Facebook because it's probably the easiest way for me back then to stay in touch with family and friends back in Scotland. They can see when I'm up to, they're on Facebook, I'm on Facebook, and I was back home one day and one of my friends, one of my best friends, his friend turned around and basically said, you're always boasting, you're always arrogant.
You're this, you're that. Totally doesn't really know me, but for whatever reason was a friend on Facebook, how you do it I guess, but give me all this shit. And I'm just like, you just don't get it. We can all be successful together and we can all raise each other up together. And even the space I'm in right now as a consultant, there's many cybersecurity consultancies out there, and there's many of them I'm good friends with, and I actually have them on the podcast. Why? Because I'm happy to promote their business as well as I am anybody else's. And I look at it, we can rise together, and that concept of gratitude is just more important than the concept of jealousy. So anyhow, one
Simon:
Thing I've always been nice to my competitors and that's something that unfortunately I don't get back all too often. Yeah,
Den:
You don't. Yeah, and
Simon:
That's really frustrating. There were two situations in the last even few months that happened, and before that I was living a really peaceful chill life, but then I had to show that I'm not taking shit, but there was a competitor of ours who shipped an absolute lie of a compare page. Totally made up totally, literally. There was no way to prove anything that they said that wasn't true. It made no sense whatsoever. Emailed them, got them to take it out. Cool. Met one of their sales guys at a conference. I was like, Hey, nice to meet you. We pushing for the same thing. We're trying to build a safer internet. We're in this together. It's nice to meet you. And he responded with something among the lines of, I want to fuck you guys up. Something like that, right?
And then I was like, well, okay, I play nice. I'm not going to deal with any of that stuff, but that strike number two, and we all know what happens at strike number three, strike number three followed. So those are the situations like, oh, I'm going to play nice, but if you're going to start becoming difficult to me, then eventually it's not going to work out that way. There was another situation where a company asked for our solution and wanted to white label it, but as an early stage startup, of course you want direct contact with your end customer. So white labeling your product not particularly something you want to do, startup doesn't help.
Den:
Yeah,
Simon:
No. And so then a few weeks later, one of their engineers tried to sign up to our product, which of course we stopped and a few other situations happened where they try to access things and lo and behold, a few months later they have a product that competes with us, which really doesn't. It's a half baked MVP, and they literally stole a good chunk of our publicly exposed client side script, which by the way is like 0.1% of our intellectual property, but it just indicates how these people operate. Why are we like this folks? Come on. Either you actually want to be in this space and you do it properly or fuck off. Just leave me alone. Leave me to do it properly. I don't get those people that want to go into this industry and half it, I just don't get it. It's so negative. It doesn't help anybody. Real people are getting harmed because of bullshit. Security products. Either do it well or walk away. If you want to make money quick, go in finance. If you want to go into security, you're also having a duty to help people.
Den:
Yeah. Well it's funny, right? So there's been a bunch of things you've said there that I want to come back on. One is, as a founder, you said earlier, building your network whether there's intentional building or unintentional building. I think one of the important things you mentioned was building your network, getting those connections because referrals and your brand, that's really important
And I think someone having faith to give you funding, it is based on you, the founder more than it is sometimes the product. Because if they've got great faith in your ability to know the market and you said know the market, you knew the space you're in. So I think any founder listening or wannabe founder listening, that's vital. You got to know the market, you got to know why you're in the market. You've got to have the passion to, as you say, you're here to solve problems and raise the planet. And then at the same time, your network, you're not, and I get like you actually since I started this business, I get way more bullshit emails and messages than ever before and 90% of them are purely written. You can tell they're mailers, they're not personalized. I mean just all the wrong shit. So I kind of look at it, there's a couple of big nuggets there. I love you sharing how that network thing was important. So you guys got funded and then you're like, okay, now we should start building, right? So you didn't start the other way around, but you had the idea, you had the vision and you knew the market and the gap in the market. You guys just recently, can you share, so you just recently done another round of funding. I only know I watched a video and I was like, oh look, there's a guy from a Chainsmokers love that band.
So where are you in the funding rounds and what do you see once you've got more funding, what do you do next?
Simon:
So I think we announced it round about nine months ago. I mean, what do we do next? I've got a plan and I'm executing my plan and I've set certain goals for myself and I raise enough money for another couple of years. I really one or two, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to get to my KPIs and then deal with that from there. It's important to understand that getting money from VCs is not really validation in any way, shape or form. You pitched it well to them. You pitched it in a way that they could bring it to their partners. Their partners did their research, they did their research, and now they give you funding to go ahead and build it. That is a very different thing from actually landing your first couple of deals, actually adding value and in our case actually stopping attacks, detecting attacks. That's really that, right?
The great thing is once you actually get to the stage that you have good customers that openly communicate with you about issues that they face, you're able to add value, you're able to detect things naturally. People will come to you with other issues that they are unable to solve with the solutions that they have. That is a great position to be in. And so from there you learn and you see things that you're able to address broader quickly because you have now have a platform. You're already often 70, 80, 90, sometimes 60 on the lower end percent there. You've got your dashboard, you've got your auth, you've got all that stuff figured out. So now you just got to actually do some small bits and pieces to get there. And in our case, given the position we are in on websites, we often have a lot of relevant information already to be able to address specific issues
Or we are in the right spot where we can make a small change to our client side script and we're able to help customers with those things in that type of chain effect is really important. And so if you're thinking about building a company, one of the things that I really admired about my time at CloudFlare was that I quickly recognized that they built the Uber wedge of em all in web security, and that was that they were asking customers to replace the DNS with their DNS and a proxy things for the customer. So they were literally living in front of everything and had the ability to manipulate anything. The ability to build is quite endless when you're in a position like that. And then at the same time, you're building servers all around the world closer to humans, and the result is now you have infrastructure all around the world as well. You can literally build anything with that. That is
Narrator:
An
Simon:
Awesome business model. There's a couple of other business things that I like that people should think about that I always had in the back of my mind, but one that I find interesting is bandwidth is a great example of this, but the line of who pays who is that if that is not very clear, that's a good opportunity for you to build a business because without you paying somebody else, you can add value to somebody and you can actually create an environment where the majority of your customers don't pay for something that actually does cost them something somewhere else. So that's helpful. So if the line is unclear, who pays who, that's column place to be. Another one is a business model. Depending where you are in your quarter, you have the ability to dial the margins up and down. Uber is a great example of this.
It could be certain if halfway through the quarter they realize they're not hitting what they want to hit, suddenly the fees will go up. And in some countries the actual Uber would pay maybe $2 more and the driver would get $2 less. There you go, $4 extra pay for Uber on the drive. There you go. They just made more money. Business models that ability are pretty awesome because you have the ability to flexibly adjust things and keep your business going. There's a lot of things there that I try to think about incorporating into our design of our startup at the earliest stage, like putting ourselves in a position where we're in a position to add as much value to customers as possible, but also helping in a way that is more affordable to them because we played that game right? By making sure we were in a space where we could get access to things at a much lower price than other people could. There's a bunch of things around there that we did and that we are now doing or are plans for us in the longer term.
Den:
Yeah, I mean that's fascinating, the concept. I mean, I never thought from the financial side of that, the concept of, I always think of it like, okay, is it a subscription model or not, and then is the price stable and understood and then you get that whole business thing where yeah, maybe it's a variable situation based on X factors. One of the things that I want to dig into a little bit is, so you built basically a client side solution, hence the C side and in the client side solution from an architecture perspective, can you explain a little bit about what the architecture's like and then when bad things happen, how are you guys protecting the clients?
Simon:
It's very standard concept is we essentially, we have to say this very clearly, a hybrid proxy. So what happens is third party JavaScripts, unless you told us not to proxy, those specific ones would get proxied by us, right? So let's see a 50 scripts on your website and you tell us, look, that analytics tool, I know that one very well, I'm fine with that. You don't have the proxy that these other ones would come through us. We would see the code, but analyze that code asynchronously. We would store it, we'd be able to do forensics on it. We are certain that what we see is what the user got. We do a lot of deep analysis on that and we find a lot of access results. So we're going to be releasing our Q2 report very soon. Probably by the time this podcast goes live, it would already be live, but we spotted about another close to a hundred thousand unique websites with net new client side attacks that nobody else noticed with.
The 300,000 in Q1 of this year are probably going to be over a million unique websites with new attacks that we spot of nobody else by the end of this year in terms of architecture and implementation. It's simple. You add us as extra the first script of the world on the webpage, the ultimate first one. And then when it comes to other scripts that are on that same initial HT ML response of that webpage, it is do a command find, replace and put our proxy in front of it. It's copy paste. It takes literally two minutes. Any sub requests proxy to us, any scripts get proxy to us that aren't on that list of scripts you don't want us to proxy. We would still report on them in our dashboard. We would still analyze them in the browser, we would still see the payload that they would still be sent to us.
We would still do all of that stuff, including what we do for first party JavaScripts, but third party JavaScripts, especially if they're coming from surface that you haven't seen before or that you don't trust as much, you want to put something in the middle because ultimately the negotiation happens between the browser of your user and that third party and you don't have any visibility in that whatsoever. Otherwise, the combination of proxy and CSP and all that kind of stuff, you can get very close to a hundred percent with proxy alone. You are also very close to there already, but it's way more manageable. So yeah, it's funny because when I start this company and explain to people what it did and how it worked, they're like, why nobody ever do this. The simple answer to that is because building a proxy that is fast is freaking hard, hard. You cannot just check it on Lambdas or cloud for workers or something. You're going to make things really slow.
Den:
If
Simon:
You want to do this, you have to invest in building a distributed network. You have to invest in building your own proxy that is purposely built for the purpose that you need. We got a lot of really great rest engineers in our company. Those people have built it from the ground up. You can't half as this if you half it, you think this is a beacon project, you can ship something that does some of the stuff that I said, but it's going to be very, very, very slow. So in many ways, you're comparing a go-kart to a Rolls Royce. Both will have four wheels and both will have a steering wheel
Den:
And both can go downhill.
Simon:
Exactly.
Den:
So one of the things, so you mentioned a thousand websites, blah, blah, blah. In that thousand website, when you're looking at the data, do you take reputation of the websites into account as well? I mean, are we talking about there's some really reputable websites with some gnarly shit in there by mistake? Or what's the makeup of these websites?
Simon:
The websites are usually our customers, but of course that 1 million websites, we do that by also monitoring random websites.
There are some websites in there that are high reputation. Others, we sometimes find really high reputation ones really disturbing ones universities, semi financianal institutions. We've also called high value targets. Some of 'em really high value targets. And then when we tell them, then the conversation starts and sometimes they're just like, oh, okay, thanks. And that's the end of it. Sometimes they do really want to talk. I mean, at the end of the day, this comes down to the fact that people spend so much money on other security factors in their platforms and they just haven't really thought about line side. And then bad actors know that if they can sneak things into a site, it's better for them to execute a malicious payload in the browser and steal the data there because there's nothing watching there.
And so unfortunately, this message hasn't landed with every large high value target around the world yet some countries are better than others. Surprisingly, Asia is investing a lot insecurity nowadays. We've got a lot of conversations with people in APEC area. PCID assist is a law mandated in Japan. So it's not just a compliance requirement. No, no. It's the law. And so there's a lot of things I would say that were cliche in the past that aren't true anymore. You are not safer on an American portal to book something than you are on a nation necessarily. Quite the opposite in some cases.
Den:
Yeah, no, that's interesting. From a client perspective, what's your typical client? What are you getting most success?
Simon:
I would say our customers usually accept credit cards or allow customers to enter sensitive information. So e-commerce of any type, hotel booking, ticket sales, clothing, perfumes, whatever you want to do, watches.
But then also insurance brokers, healthcare providers, universities. But we've got a couple of news networks as well that rely on third party ad networks that are essentially a JavaScript distribution engine. So people will use those to try and distribute malicious scripts around the world, basically, I think is the most value environment we can find ourselves in an environment where there's an ad and a payment field on the same page. That's a really prime target for these types of attacks. I mean, we've got a bit of everything. It's a really interesting one. We've got an industry section on our website that I constantly have to add new things to because there's just more and more use cases jumping in.
Den:
Yeah. Now you mentioned design partners. So I've always been fascinated by this in the startup world because there, there's a challenge I think every founder faces, which is, you've got your blinders on, this is what I want to do. And then you've got a shiny big new prospect, especially when you're younger in your journey and they want what you're doing, but they also want to design partner the hell out of it and maybe take you down paths that you strategically don't want to go down. So how do you deal with that challenge when your design partners are trying to get you to go down a journey that doesn't feel right for you?
Simon:
We haven't really had that, I must say I've been aware of that risk. And so what we do is we only really build features that customers request. If we already had it planned or there's multiple customers requesting it, at which point it would be planned. I'll give you an example. One of our early stage prospects that reached out to us said, we get client side security and we see you're uniquely positioned to do a great job at that, but we also have these privacy compliance requirements that we need to monitor, and it's annoying because I don't want to have you and this other thing, it would be great if you could do both. And to that, I said, well, okay, let's just give us a few weeks. And then we built a data exfiltration engine as well so that we monitor what data is being accessed by which scripts and where some of that data is being sent to, and that then also met those needs.
Those are the types of things where I would say engage, talk to them, explain to them in real openness how long something would take. There has been one situation where we entered into a design partnership for a use case that the customer had, and that just by the time we had something, we're like, your competitors don't like those types of situations to happen, but they can happen. And you just have to realize that timing is always a thing and timing is something that you don't have much control over if you're building something from the ground up. You have to set expectations. Yeah, that's how I've dealt with that. I mean, just be smart about it. I mean, don't build things because one company in the world needs, it just doesn't quite work unless that company is willing to pay 20 million a year for it. Of course, then
Den:
You might be swayed a little bit.
Simon:
If one customer is the US government, then yeah, there's plenty of companies who have one customer that is the US government is making good money.
Den:
Yeah. So what does the next five years look like? When you think of five years in the future, where do you think Seaside is going to be
Simon:
In terms of customer base and products? I mean, it's basically going to, I want to be on as many websites as possible and protecting customers as well as possible against a new wave of issues that we're facing now. I think it's important to realize that the world just moves from a web environment where bots on your page were bad unless they were SEO crawlers or specific desired bots to, there's a lot of automated behavior actually want have now and then those same environments that are used to do things automated on your page that you want will also be used for things that you don't want. So there's opportunities to do things there. I think it's interesting to see when people go into that space without it knowing it. I used to work on that space. There's a lot of half baked crap in that area. Don't go into bot detection of any types or fraud detection or client side security. If you haven't gotten real work experience in it, it just doesn't work. You ship paper where it doesn't actually, the bad actors are smarter in the security companies in this space more than it's really good. Yeah,
Den:
Yeah. No, that's brilliant. Okay, so there's a lot of stress and pressure that comes with this gig. What do you do to try and relieve that stress pressure and keep yourself sane? I
Simon:
Think the big thing that I try to do more is just listen to my body. Last Friday, I was sitting by my computer for a few hours and I noticed I barely got anything done. My eye was twitching and I felt exhausted. I was like, well, look, I mean, my team is working on the 4th of July, not in the us, many of them, but I'm exhausted and I need to take a break then yeah, go surf with friends and hang out or just relax a bit. There's the, I'm doing a lot type of stress. That's one type of it. There's the other type of stress where it's something bad has happened or I'm worried about something kind of stress. I find that type way more difficult, but I've actually not had that much the one or two times that that has happened. Talking to other people, going for a run helps structure those types of situations and get back in the game. I dunno how people do this whole building a startup thing. If you had a family and children, I really have no idea. This is all consuming for, I mean, as a solo founder, it's definitely consuming, but yeah, that's how it
Den:
Works. Yeah, I was going to say that, right? I like most founders work every single day. There's no difference. I mean, the only difference for me between a Monday, Friday and a Saturday, Sundays, I've got less meetings on a Saturday and Sunday, but I'll still do, and it's always a case of plugging away, plugging away. You're just chipping away at the things that you're thinking is going to help move the business forward. And for me, I'll chip away on a Sunday as well as I'll chip away on a Wednesday. I'm still going to jump in front for a bit, but getting away from the computer, getting out in nature for you, surfing for me, a walk, a trail. But I think every executive, everyone who's under pressure, so you don't even have to be an executive. But I think the reality is if you struggle to handle pressure, then getting out in nature, doing something where you're not near technology really just helps bring you back, but also gives you a chance to think, because I think sometimes we just don't take a minute to just brainstorm internally and give ourself also some forgiveness sometimes for, because I dunno about you, Simon, but I'm really impatient.
I am like, I want 50 more customers than I've got right now. I always want more. I always want more. And what do I need to do or what can I do to let people know we exist? And like you say, all those emails and stuff, they don't do shit. So it's networking and I'm out there, I'm doing stuff like this. But the more you do, then the more people get to know you exist and the more conversations you'll have. We actually, we got introduced via another networking group, GBX. So the thing for me is the more of these groups that you follow that aren't your normal tech ones, I think the better. So yeah. I know we're up on time. I'm going to give you the final thought. How can people find you guys? I mean, we'll put links in the stuff, but give us the, where's best to find you and what do you want to leave the audience with?
Simon:
Seaside or Dev? So Charlie, from the letter C side dev, that's our website. I mean, there's context, form there and drop me a note there. That's the best way to reach me. Something to leave here, but I want to make it a salesy thing. I feel like we've done enough of that. I mean, yeah, if you don't know what's happening with your website in a browser for user, which you probably don't talk to me, there you go. That's that. But then when the actual subject, if you're looking to start your own company, have your primary plan and have your secondary plan and make sure that you're the subject matter expert on both. I get a lot of messages from people who start a company in a space that I can tell them upfront isn't going to work and then this doesn't work, and then a year later they're like, I'm going to do this other thing that they have never actually encountered themselves that is also going to fail. There's a lot of stuff like that happening in the space. Don't be that person. Spend a few years learn a thing, learn a craft. Somebody that never likes food or doesn't like to cook is not going to run a star restaurant, right? It's just not how the world works. So the same applies to startups.
Den:
Perfect. Simon, thank you very much. I appreciate you being on the show everybody. Simon Wijckmans from CSide, CSide.dev. Catch 'em, check it out. It's great technology. I'm impressed. And it doesn't, oh no, wait, it does. It takes a shit lot to impress me. So everybody check out Simon and his wares. You'll not regret it. Simon. Cheers man. Great catching up. Take it easy.
Narrator:
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