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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

This is a nice, clean, simple idea. I like this kind of business model, where dev time and technical overhead is minimal, and the focus is on operations. It seems to me that operations based businesses are more defensible, create more jobs, and in general are more fun to run/optimize.

My question: who is your target market? Seems like you want enterprise customers, but specifically I'm wondering which industries?

Do companies interested in this service already employ somebody to do it? And is it a matter as simple as wiping, magnetizing, and drilling the drives? It seems like that would take < 5 minutes per drive of unskilled labor, so I'm wondering exactly how willing companies will be to dump their in-house (probably cheap) labor already performing this service, in a seemingly safer environment.

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Thanks for the kind words!

Our target market, at this point, is: small businesses and end consumers.

Our goal is to eventually serve enterprise customers, but we're not going after that for the moment for several reasons (resources, depth of product offering, etc.)

A typical customer would be a small business that goes through 50 or so hard drives per year, enough that they'd want to send us a batch every month. They would also be interested of getting a third party (us) certificate of destruction for their records (industry standard).

Thanks for your feedback and questions. Let me know if there's anything else that I can answer for you. Cheers!

What kind of small business fits that profile? I'm having trouble imagining a business requirement that calls for filling an entire hard drive every month, only to destroy it. Is this for something like banks (mentioned on your website) where 30-day record keeping of sensitive data is necessary? What aspect of the data disallows them from simply reusing disks?

We're not targeting a specific small business kind, we're going more by size. Big enough to have several hard drives in their offices, small enough that enterprise shredding services are too expensive and big for them.

A lot of companies are moving their storage to the cloud, and the old hard rives need to be destroyed. Other companies upgraded their hard drive size (from 500gb to 1tb) and have no use for the old one. And finally, a lot of hard drives fail (there's about a 10% chance your hard drive will fail, each year, after its second year.

We want to destroy all of those drives :)

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