Canary tokens and digital tripwires (Changelog Interviews #683)

What's up, friends? Welcome back. This is The Change Law. This week on The Change Law, we have Haroon Mir back. Haroon is the founder of Thinkst, the 50-person bootstrap company behind Canary and Canary Tokens. They are honeypots and tripwires you sprinkle inside your network and forget about forever. until an attacker touches one. We talk about the AWS API key token attackers just can't resist trying the real credit card token they have that's backed by an actual bank partnership. They have breadcrumbs, their brand new feature that leads intruders straight to your canaries. a live demo where a hardware canary becomes a Synology NAS in one click, and how a company with zero outbound sales and no price increase in 10 years quietly passed $22.5 million in annual recurring revenue. Baller. A massive thank you to our friends and our partners at Fly.io. That is the home of changelog.com. Learn more at Fly.io. Okay, let's do this. Well, friends, we're back. Haroon is back. It's been a few years. Haroon, a big fan of your tiny little company. I don't want to say tiny in like a pejorative, but just how much impact. And I mean that in a loving way. A 40-person company just having massive impact in the cybersecurity world. We talked to you before about Things and Canary and Canary Tokens. Take us back into the world because... we now have AI where the last time we talked, I mean, we probably had the burgeoning early beginnings and the early innings of it. I mean, if you could even call that probably like the farm league to keep going with the baseball analogy, but we're now in a world where, The attackers have the same tools we have, which has always been the case. But these tools we have give us versions of superpowers. I can imagine this world you're in right now is just insane. One, massive ARR. If you want to mention, you can't think TechCrunch did it for you, but you can certainly as well. I just want to paint the picture for who you are, where you work, what you do, and just a massive impact in monetary value because, hey – capitalist uh and we run businesses right uh but at the same time you're giving away a lot for free too you could be making more

yeah

is that enough of a an intro for you what do you think

i think that's great um so so company wise company wise um like you said we're pretty small company uh people wise we're just over 50 people now which is uh which which feels pretty big to us 50? Okay, not

40. I'm mistaken.

Yeah, so we've just hit 50 and we feel that's huge. But the company is almost entirely technical. And we've done a few things pretty unusually. So for one thing, we still do zero outbound sales. So last year, we hit 10 years of selling things to Canary. And we still never reach out to customers. So everything's happened just with word of mouth. Like we initially made something that a few customers like and they said nice things about us and we just try to not let them down. And for the most part, like I like to think that we almost the poster children for doing business this way, which is like do good things and good things will happen to you and it makes you do good things. And so I think like the model is a sustainable one.