Ask HN: Are there any success stories for privacy focused companies? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there any success stories for privacy focused companies?

3 pointslordofgibbons4 comments

I'm exploring the idea of creating a bootstrapped product to serve an existing market where privacy is non-existent, and the space is dominated by large Ad companies.

This has me thinking, are there any success stories for companies branding themselves as the "privacy focused alternative"? My hesitation comes from the fact that most people don't know or care that they're constantly being tracked online, so the market size might be pretty tiny.

I can thinking of many failed attempts, but the only success story I can think of is DuckDuckGo and the fact that they reached profitability. But I'm not sure how lucrative the returns on investment have been for them.

- DuckDuckGo: I think they're pretty successful.

- The Tor Project: it's a foundation, but the US government provides roughly half their ~8 million USD funding per year.

- Apple: perhaps not the greatest example from the point of view of some commenters here for reasons I'm honestly not sure of and would like to learn more about, but their products like: Advanced Data Protection, Private Relay, Hide My Email, are pretty useful and have huge adoption and possibly enormous impact.

- Brave Browser: 10s of millions of users.

- Unplugged: focused on private smartphone, it's a startup but their backers show they believe it has impact.

- DOSYAGO (my tiny company): we're a profitable startup that builds products that have strong overlap with privacy, like BrowserBox: https://github.com/BrowserBox/BrowserBox

- Kagi search: (not sure if they're profitable), but they're big and getting bigger (and seemingly loved here!) :)

I encourage you to get into this space. I don't think it's going to slow down! :)

What product are you thinking about?

This space should be much larger than it is but obviously, lots of people just don't care.

If you have nothing to hide, your life is irrelevant.

"I don't care about my rights because they are worthless to me"

Signal, NextCloud, Proton family, etc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com