Reflecting Back on Our AppArmor Journey
Welcome to the Dave vs. Startups.
Back in 2011, when the app stores were barely a year old, my brother Chris and I started building what would become AppArmor. No investors. No safety net.
Just us and a crazy idea about campus safety apps.
Chris is 10 years older than me (and is the coding genius).
I handled the business and marketing side of things. Chris did everything else… but don’t tell him I said that .
This is the full story:
We had about five different products running simultaneously in those early days.
Most were tiny, making maybe $10-20K each for the year.
But when you added them up, it gave us just enough foundation to keep experimenting.
The campus safety app started from an audit I was doing at my alma mater.
We found that 30% of those blue emergency poles you see on campuses were actually broken or not functioning.
I pitched the mobile app idea in a campus safety meeting, and suddenly I had to actually build the thing (who am I kidding… Chris built it lol).
Here's something few people will tell you about bootstrapping:
You become a human Swiss Army knife out of necessity.
I'm presenting our safety app to campus security directors at major universities like UCLA and NYU.
Then working with Chris to implement the custom features they requested in those meetings.
Sometimes a support ticket comes in about our mass notification system not working properly.
There's no support team to escalate to. Chris and I were the support team.
Customer service became our superpower.
We couldn't rely on brand recognition or investor connections.
Every single interaction had to be perfect because that's all we had.
It sounds inefficient, and honestly, it felt overwhelming most days.
But it gave me something most CEOs never get: complete intimacy with every aspect of the business.
I lived through our entire development cycle.
I knew exactly how long implementations took because I did them.
When we were building software for enterprises, every major deal started with me in the room.
When customers had issues with our deployment process, we felt that pain personally because we were the ones handling the implementation.
By the time we hit $7 million in annual recurring revenue, I could design the right systems because I'd personally experienced every bottleneck.
We ended up with 350 organizations on our platform.
Including Princeton, UCLA, and 100 of 150 Canadian institutions.
Our retention was 98-99% because we learned exactly what made customers stick around.
When we finally sold AppArmor for $40 million, people asked how we built such an efficient operation with just 20 employees serving hundreds of organizations.
The answer was simple:
Chris and I did every job in the company before hiring someone else to do it better.
Bootstrapping is brutal.
You'll work harder than you ever thought possible.
But there's no business education that compares to being forced to master every function yourself.
When you finally do scale, you'll build the right systems because you lived through all the wrong ones first.
——————————————
Engineers face a 9% competence penalty when colleagues know they used AI tools, with this penalty being perception-based rather than performance-based since the actual work output was identical.
I think it's about job security.
What do you think?
Tune into the Startup Different Podcast