Inspiring Small Businesses: Simple Cyber Life

In our ‘Inspiring small businesses’ series, we share and celebrate great stories from small business owners who started and run their own business. By bringing you closer to these inspiring businesses we hope that you find motivation, tips, and ideas for building yours. For our next interview, we spoke to Jonny Pelter, Founder of SimpleCyberLife.com a consumer internet safety business.

SimpleCyberLife.com is the world’s first membership site designed to help parents protect their families online. We help families assess what protection they need, support them getting it in place and help them recover when something goes wrong. We then have a team of internet safety experts who can answer all the questions our members can throw at them!

We help our members with a wide range of important issues such as helping kids with cyber bullying, managing screen time in lock-down, removing computer viruses, installing anti-virus software, online gaming addiction, prevent sexual predators contacting their kids, sexting, recovering from hacked social media accounts, preventing online fraud, avoiding scams and lots more!

What's the story behind your business?

I’m a cyber security expert who historically helped big banks, large oil & gas companies and other big corporates protect their data from hackers and cyber criminals. For years family and friends would ask for my help when their Facebook got hijacked, their email got hacked or their child was suffering from cyber bullying online.

Slowly I realised there was nowhere they could go to get the help and support they needed. Often they came to me as a last resort. I studied research on realised the current way that parents try to protect their families online is broken.

Parents attend a school talk once-per-year where you get bombarded with scaremongering stories of everything that can go wrong online. No practical guidance that is actually actionable and no ongoing support for after they leave. Parents return home from these online safety talks with more questions than answers.

Paralysed by the complexity of it all, resulting in them implementing no protection at all. I got fed up and built SimpleCyberLife.com to fix it.

What inspired you to start your own business?

It’s an opportunity to make a genuine difference in society. In the corporate cyber security profession, when a company gets hacked they simply up the budgets and throw more money at protecting themselves. No significant real-life implications.

Conversely, when something goes wrong for families, it has significant emotional, physical and mental health related implications. 73% of teens have been cyber bullied and the vast majority of victims have low self-esteem as a result and some even suicidal thoughts. Every 30 mins extra screen time makes kids 2.3x more likely to develop a speech impediment. If we can crack the code to helping parents protect their families in a digital world we can literally save lives.

The prospect of building something capable of doing this, is enough inspiration for me.

 What is the most difficult aspect of running your own business?

Striking the balance between keeping the lights on and working on the business itself. As a membership site, my members are my first priority. I must delivery great value to them first before I spend time trying to build the business.

What is the best thing about running your own business?

The autonomy to build something from scratch yourself, realising a vision you had. I love knowing that we have something that provides families a genuinely revolutionary service and protects families from threats like cyber criminals, fraudsters, sexual predators and cyber bullies.

It’s awesome to think that if we hadn’t spent the time building out this service to help families, that they would otherwise have suffered with an cyber-attack online. We’re able to help them before incidents become problematic, improving their wellbeing and overall health as a result. 

What advice would you give to aspiring business owners?

Often part of the reason why people don’t ‘take the leap’ sooner (or sometimes, at all) is because they don’t know where to start. My advice is to simply rip the band-aid off and start today – the finer details can all be worked out down the road. Start building and start creating today and soon, things naturally start coming together.

People let limiting beliefs stop them from starting. Like “I don’t know how to start a business” or “I don’t have the time or the content I need to start”. Embrace these weaknesses and try to revel in the challenge of overcoming them. Everything is ‘work-out-able’.

To find out more about SimpleCyberLife.com visit their website or follow them on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter.