Create Fine-grained Authorizations

Interested in starting your own entrepreneurial journey but unsure what to expect? Then read up on our interview with Fred Dogan, Co-Founder and CEO of Permify, located in San Francisco, CA, USA.

What's your business, and who are your customers?

Permify is an open-source authorization service that helps engineering teams to build fast, secure, and scalable access control systems in their applications. Our customers are mid to enterprise-level engineering teams who need to have fast, flexible, and reliable permissions systems for their applications. One example of access control and authorization could be the access privileges in Google Drive. For instance, you can control who can access a document and which actions they can take on those documents. - This is an authorization.

Tell us about yourself

My co-founders and I have known each other for 10 years since high school. We have been building products since then. We had an ed-tech platform with 100k active users. We encountered this problem at that time. Building a flexible access control system that can both fulfill our users and don't slow down the product was hard. And we simply couldn't find a flexible solution that could help us. So, we had to reinvent the wheel again. Eventually, our ed-tech platform failed, and we formed a product agency. Agency became successful, and we started working with a lot of enterprise customers.

Yet, we keep hitting the same problem. These customers were using different tools for both authentication and identity. But they kept reinventing the wheel for authorization. And we hate not having a reusable solution for those customers. It was painful for those engineering teams and us to work on the authorization. Those were the times that we wanted to change this and create a single place to build an authorization system just like Stripe did for Payments. We want to be the access control infrastructure for the internet.

What's your biggest accomplishment as a business owner?

Acquiring our first customer :)

What's one of the hardest things that comes with being a business owner?

Daily ups and downs.

What are the top tips you'd give to anyone looking to start, run and grow a business today?

Learn to create your hypothesis and understand your problems.
Start with your own problem.
Learn to test your hypothesis. Create a small initial version, and then you can improve that. Action is the key.

Where can people find you and your business?

Website: https://www.permify.co/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/permifyco/

If you like what you've read here and have your own story as a solo or small business entrepreneur that you'd like to share, then please answer these interview questions. We'd love to feature your journey on these pages.

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