The ten challenges I've faced building a 'Privacy-First' startup
When I started Metomic two years ago, I wanted the company to be privacy-first.
I never dreamed it would be such a challenge. The internet was simply not built with data privacy in mind!
We've overcome obstacles in places, and made sacrifices in others.
We're still not perfect, but I'm proud of where we're at and want to share some of the learnings in getting here in the hope they are helpful for other indie hackers and startups out there.
https://medium.com/@richardjvibert/how-to-build-a-privacy-first-startup-9e8f944d7d26
It talks about the following challenges:
- Cookie notices
- Privacy policies
- Website and app analytics
- Customer chat widgets
- Email marketing
- Surveys
- Internal productivity tools
- Advertising
- Recruiting
- Data deletion requests
Hope it's useful to some and would love to hear if anyone else has done anything similar?
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@richvibert
Great post on communicating the intention of why we all should build privacy first applications. For Surveys, I'm building BlockSurvey(https://blocksurvey.io). Let me know if it helps. Any feedback is welcome.
Thanks @wilsonbright. Checked out BlockSurvey and it looks awesome! Definitely going to give it a go and will let you know if I have any feedback. My first thought is: do you offer a free plan? It's a big blocker to getting started if you don't because I already have a Typeform subscription and would want to try this out before buying.
It is free for all early adopters. I'm yet to introduce a subscription. All the features are available at no cost.
Cool cool, we're going to try it out
Such a cool post! Personally I also want to create product with privacy-first in mind. It's fairly easy to stay on this track when you're developing it by yourself. But what happens when you have to justify putting much more effort into developing features just because you have to be ethical and careful about user data? I mean - are there any business-related metrics that would justify this trade off?
Because of my beliefs I also tend to use privacy-first tools, but only because I believe in the idea. From my perspective being honest about using user-provided data is also a selling technique. Reality is though - people don't care (in vast majority at least). They want service and I think, sadly, we're not there yet for the privacy to be important factor when choosing a solution.
Do you have any thoughts on that? Did you do all this work just because believed in the general idea or maybe there were some other presumptions?
Hey @pawelhemperek, thanks for the comment. I totally agree with you. Some big companies are starting to make privacy part of their brand proposition (e.g. Apple) but there isn't enough evidence yet that this helps a company make more profit and so, sadly, it's still ignored by a lot of companies out there. We did all of this because 1) we are passionate about privacy/ethics (as human beings running a startup), and 2) we DO believe that in the future people will care more about their privacy than they do today and thus it's a long term investment in our brand that will have meaningful ROI in the next 2, 5, 10 years.
Thanks for your answer! I guess the only way to make the change happen is to emphasize importance of privacy-first in our products and slowly waiting for customer to learn that this is something they should care about!
I'll certainly look into your products in this regard ;-)
We're doing what we can... the more help there better :)