Q&A:
Chandler Givens and Ryan Flach
Why did you start your business?
The concept for the business was really the result of a series of discussions we had about current methods used to personally identify consumers and track their behaviors across the web. Just from a personal, ideological standpoint, both of us felt strongly that the scope and depth of these methods have gotten totally out of hand. Eventually the discussion lead to whether it would be possible to use technological measures to prevent or at least mitigate these types of privacy threats. Six months later we released TrackOFF, the only software available that blocks the newest forms of online tracking.
How will you finance it?
We're both pushing 30 -- ancient by Silicon Valley startup standards. The plus side of waiting that long to start our first business is that it has allowed us to self-fund, at least for the time being. Our plan is to bootstrap for as long as possible.
What benchmarks for growth have you established?
The nice thing about software development is that there aren't any marginal costs. We've built a good product, the trick now is building awareness and a decent customer base so that we can continue to refine and improve our approach to creating the best privacy protection tools on the market. If we can build up a decent sized user base within the next year, we think we can accomplish that.
What are the biggest obstacles have you faced so far?
When we first started developing TrackOFF we decided that it was important for consumers to be able to use the software on their existing web browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome), rather than forcing them to use a new product to browse the web. Without getting into nerdy details, figuring out how to accomplish that without the user seeing any performance degradation in the browsing experience was a challenge. We ultimately engineered some eloquent solutions to do just that, but it took a lot of critical thought and hard work.
Where do you see your business in five years?
Right now we're really focused on how we can make TrackOFF the best software possible and immediately provide a desperately needed product to consumers. If we can grow the company with those values in mind, we think in five years we'll be in a good position.