SECURITYSQUAD: How a security consultant finally got his website to match the business behind it

René Karcher spent two years paying developers to build him a website. Two different developers, two different results, and neither one came close to what he actually wanted.

Meanwhile, his security consulting business was growing, clients were showing up, and every time someone asked for the URL, he cringed a little.

Three IT guys with a gap in the market

René and his co-founders, Daniel Oppe and Valeri Schock, had spent two decades inside enterprise companies, handling security, networking, and infrastructure. A big part of that work meant hiring external consultants for projects, but the quality just wasn’t there.

“We always looked for good external consulting, and we missed this on the market,” René says.

So, in 2022, the three of them founded SECURITYSQUAD in Frickingen, on Lake Constance in southern Germany. They wanted to do the kind of work they’d always wanted to hire but could never find.

Daniel leads the technical side as CTO, designing security architectures. Valeri runs operations and client support. René handles strategy and the business itself.

Their clients are government bodies and businesses with 100 to 500 employees. The work ranges from penetration testing and security audits to full IT security concepts.

But running a three-person firm means doing everything yourself. Cold calling, client meetings, email campaigns, proposals.

The website was supposed to help bring in new business. It was the place where potential clients could see the team’s credentials and get in touch. Instead, it kept getting bumped by whatever was more urgent that week.

Two developers, a lot of money, and still not right

It started in 2022 with a self-hosted WordPress site. René doesn’t sugarcoat it: “This looked really, really bad.”

The first developer they hired took the money and delivered something that still missed the mark.

The business was picking up speed at the same time, which meant even less time for website problems. That underwhelming site stayed live for about a year because nobody had the bandwidth to replace it.

The second developer rebuilt the whole thing from scratch. Still not what René had in mind.

It wasn’t just the redesigns that wore them down. It was every small change in between. René describes the cycle – sitting in a meeting, saying, “Could you move this button?” and then waiting two days.

Another round of feedback. Another wait.

“I know what I want for my business. I know what I want for my customers,” he says. But there was always someone in the middle who didn’t quite get it.

When they moved from self-hosting to professional hosting, they chose Hostinger for European data centers (an important requirement for a security company), strong online recommendations, and easy onboarding.

But the core problem persisted: the website still didn’t match what René had in mind.

Ten prompts and a completely different website

One evening, René logged into hPanel to make some WordPress changes and noticed Hostinger Horizons. He’d always believed AI was the future, so he tried creating a new website with it.

After about ten prompts, he was looking at something more professional than what two paid developers had delivered.

“The first draft was with ten prompts, and I was really impressed by what Horizons could do there,” he says.

Within two days, the first live version was online. Over the next two months, René gradually built out the rest: service pages, pricing for their security audit and VPN service offerings, a blog, and SEO setup. All in, the site used around 120 credits.

The contrast with the old way of working was immediate. Instead of emailing a developer and waiting days, he could describe what he wanted in plain language and see it delivered.

“Otherwise I’m sitting in meetings, ‘could you change this button, could you change this button,’ and two days later, yeah, they changed the button,” he says. “Now I tell Horizons, please change the button, try a creative form or whatever. And it does it.”

Something he didn’t expect: he was actually having fun.

René calls himself and his co-founders “not the creative guys.” They’re infrastructure and security people. But building the website started feeling like what it really is for a technical person: exploring what a new tool can do.

“It’s really fun to discover new AI features, new technical parts. When you have a tool where you can use natural language to say what you want, and you know what you want for your business… it’s really nice.”

He also found a practical rhythm: brainstorming ideas with ChatGPT and Hostinger’s AI assistant Kodee before executing in Horizons. That saved credits and helped him think through trickier tasks, like Google tag implementation, which alone cost around 30 credits and a lot of back-and-forth prompting.

A website that finally works for the business

SECURITYSQUAD is a consulting company. Clients come through cold calls, referrals, and direct meetings.

But every one of those conversations leads to the same moment: the potential client goes to the website to see who they’re actually dealing with.

That’s why the site matters so much. It’s the thing that backs up everything else they do. And for two years, it wasn’t pulling its weight.

Now it is. Traffic has gone from 10-20 visitors a day to 200-300 (with Google Ads in the mix). More leads are coming through. But what René values most is that when he has an idea for the site, he can act on it immediately.

A blog to drive organic traffic took ten minutes to set up. A new service page can be live the same day. The website finally moves at the same speed as the rest of the business.

The main reason was that we could bring our ideas to the web page really fast and in a professional way,” René says. “We need good content that we can deliver really fast, and Horizons supports us for this.”

What’s next for SECURITYSQUAD

René plans to keep building the site as SECURITYSQUAD grows, adding content and pages whenever the business calls for it.

What’s worth stepping back and noticing is what actually happened here. A three-person security firm in southern Germany, with no design skills and no development background, built a professional website that generates leads and looks like it was done by an agency.

They didn’t learn how to code, and they didn’t find the right freelancer. It was just that the tools finally caught up to people like René: business owners who know exactly what they want but never had a way to build it themselves.

Now he does.