John Ozbay is a designer, coder & composer, founder & CEO of Cryptee.
He is an award winning engineer/creative, who attended the Oscars in 2016 with his works; and musician / sound engineer with works that aired in fes tivals globally. He excels in designing unique experiences and artifacts; using design, code, music, electronics and robotics as a medium of art and expression.
What is Cryptee all about?
In short, Cryptee is a safe, encrypted place to write personal documents, privately store photos, and more. You can write personal documents, notes, journals, create photo albums, store photos, and all sorts of other files.
The biggest and perhaps the most important differentiator is that your documents, photos, even their filenames are all encrypted before they leave your device. So we can’t read your documents or see your photos, and no one else can either. And second biggest differentiator is that Cryptee is entirely open-source, so anyone can read our code, verify and fact-check our security and privacy promises.
Otherwise, Cryptee has all the features you’d expect from a modern document editor, like live sync with unlimited devices, rich document editing, to-dos, markdown, hotkeys, code highlighting, latex math, embeds, attachments, support for tables, ability to attach pdf files, read epub ebooks, listen to audio-memos, as well as open and link other various file formats.
Tell us a little bit about your background and how you started your company?
I have a mixed background in Computer Science, Electronics, and Music. I started making music, tinkering with electronics, writing small bits of code as a kid, and haven’t stopped ever since. Prior to creating Cryptee, I’ve worked on lots of strange projects. Ranging from interactive installations to experiential brand presences in NYC Pride Parade, to interactive parks in Las Vegas; to a robotic installation for the Oscars in 2016, thanks to which I got to walk the red carpet and met some of my childhood heroes in person. Meanwhile, I kept composing classical piano music, released a bunch of albums, grew an audience in time, and got to meet some of my musical heroes. I’ve been incredibly lucky, met lots of amazing people, and eventually in 2017, I started noticing one common pattern in all my interactions.
Every month or so, there was yet another data privacy scandal, and pretty much everyone I talked to were asking me about what they can do to stay safe online. The common underlying theme causing the fear was “companies hold way too much information about us”. Be it personal documents or private photo storage, there was no simple and easy solution to store any of this data privately. So I thought perhaps I should do something about this.
At the time I was living in NY, and I knew that I would have to move to another country with stronger privacy laws if I want to do this properly. So in 30 days, I packed my life, moved to Estonia and started Cryptee with my own savings. After a year of coding, in June 2018, I made a post about Cryptee on Reddit and got 20,000 users overnight. It was quite a humbling experience to say the very least.
What would you say are the top 3 skills needed to be a successful entrepreneur, and why?
I think the first and most important skill for an entrepreneur is to learn how to define what ‘success’ means for them. Is it money? Is it fame? Is it leaving a legacy? Is it making others happy? Making something valuable for others? Making something that changes people’s lives for good? It’s quite easy to forget that some of these things can be mutually exclusive. It’s okay to want to make money or be famous. But money can’t buy fame, and fame won’t guarantee making money, etc. For me, success means making something valuable for others and change their lives for good. I don’t need to make billions from it or become famous.
With that being the definition of success for me, I think the other two skills an entrepreneur needs are perseverance and knowing how/when/what/where to say “no”. I’m of the opinion that even if you’re unmotivated, or having a bad day, if you have a solid discipline, and can persevere, you can still keep powering through the work and make progress towards your goals, and even if these goals are quite far away you’ll eventually get there.
It’s incredibly easy to fall into the “yes” trap, say “yes” to too many business-clients, customers, friends, family or things, – perhaps some of whom/which you didn’t really want to say “yes” to – and spend too much time, money, resources, or morale here and there. It’s important to try to remember that if you have time, you can make money. But if you have money, you can’t “make” time. – You can “buy” time, but only for so long. There’s only a finite amount of time, and how you use it matters A LOT. So say “no” if you think something doesn’t align with your values, goals, plans or dreams. Early on in my professional career, I said “yes” to too many people and things. I can see so clearly, now more than ever that there’s no need nor reason to fight daily personal battles unless you absolutely have to.
What are your plans for the future, how do you plan to grow this company?
Short term, we’ve been slowly working on two more services / apps to add to our platform, which we’re hoping to release over the course of 2021. Long term, I’m aiming to make Cryptee even more accessible and available for everyone, add multiple languages and features that will make it easier for everyone to have a private corner for themselves on the internet.
Our biggest bottleneck so far has been customer support / helpdesk. We’re trying to be educative, open and transparent with our customer support communications, and not be a faceless entity with bots responding to questions. I think it’s incredibly important for privacy-first companies like us to provide simple, informative, easy to understand responses to everyone, even to not-so-technically-savvy folks like my parents. And that takes a lot of time. More time and resources than I initially estimated. So at the moment, we’re focusing on rapidly growing our customer support team, while maintaining the same quality of help.
How have the pandemic and Lockdown affected you or your new business?
With more people working from home to be safe, and spending more time in front of their personal devices, more people started finding themselves in need of a safe home on the internet as well. Throughout Spring 2020, our customerbase grew 7%/week, every week. Every day we woke up to see yet another record high number of sign-ups, our helpdesk got completely overwhelmed with messages, and for a while everyone in the company, – including myself, even our accountants – were all responding to helpdesk messages to help keep the situation under control. It was a surreal and awe-inspiring few months.
Otherwise, thankfully, Estonia being a small country that is naturally-socially distant due to cold, pandemic itself didn’t change much in our day-to-day lives. We kept working from home as usual – because let’s be honest, nobody normally wanted to commute to an office when it’s -30°C/-22°F outside anyways – and we tried to keep ourselves occupied with helping others as much as we could.
How do you separate yourself from your competitors?
I’d say our privacy-first, zero-knowledge model, combined with being a proudly self-funded company is our biggest differentiator. I feel incredibly lucky to be working in the field of privacy and security. Cryptee being entirely open-source, we pretty much invite competition, share our recipes, ideas and methods openly. So as strange as it may sound, I want more companies to take our ideas and apply our data-privacy practices. The more competitors we have the better! It’s a win-win situation and a net gain for everyone’s privacy and security.
What were the top three mistakes you made starting your business, and what did you learn from them?
The biggest mistake I made – and likely many other entrepreneurs made – is that we thought that if we build something, people would come. Sadly that’s not the reality. If you build a stadium in the middle of nowhere, no matter how great it is, if people don’t know it’s there, and if they can’t easily get there, nobody would come. It doesn’t matter how important the stadium was for you, or how much time or money you spent building it. It took me a while to come to terms with this reality, take corrective action and make the platform more accessible.
The second biggest mistake I made was to put too much emphasis on the tech itself, and too little emphasis on customer support and marketing. This sort of ties back to the first point, but it’s incredibly important to know that good tech itself won’t mean much if you can’t market it. Or when you do manage to market it and get tons of customers, good tech alone won’t mean much, if you can’t support your customers.
Tell us a little bit about your marketing process, what has been the most successful form of marketing for you?
Word of mouth is our largest source of referrals, and will probably always be. One strange aspect of running a privacy-first company is that we don’t know where our customers are coming from or how they discover us, unless they tell us. Because we don’t track our users. Generally though, we tend to get larger spikes of sign-ups when some other company has a privacy-scandal. For example, when Facebook leaked some user-data or updated Whatsapp’s privacy policy for worse, these events made people search for more privacy-conscious alternatives and find out about Cryptee somehow. So funnily enough, our most successful marketing campaigns have been other companies’ lack of respect for people’s data-privacy in general.
What have been your biggest challenges and how did you overcome them?
I think the biggest challenge for me was striking a healthy work/life balance, while trying to build the company, especially during the first few years. As entrepreneurs, we tend to spend 99% of our time talking about our companies, and business models and ROI, etc, but the elephant in the room nobody’s talking about is our personal lives. It’s been a difficult journey, and I’ve frequently upset those who were closest to me by being absent, missing out on some of the social warning signs, signals, and clues from friends and family. It took a great deal amount of patience on my loved ones’ part, and it took financial & emotional stability on my part to overcome and take corrective action on the mistakes I made.
What are the top 3 online tools and resources you’re currently using to grow your company?
It’s quite meta, but we actually use Cryptee daily to work on Cryptee. Perks of making a productivity tool is that we are its biggest users. Aside from that, we heavily rely on Sentry All apps come with bugs, and Cryptee is no exception. Sentry helps us identify, track & hunt them down. Just like Cryptee, Sentry is entirely open source, and they’re also incredibly kind folks who sponsor Cryptee.
We also heavily rely on BrowserStack. Even the tiniest changes we make can easily break Cryptee on older devices. So we test things out rigorously before we release an update to ensure Cryptee works on all devices and browsers as smoothly as possible. It’s an amazing tool made by equally amazing folks who also sponsor Cryptee.
Can you recommend one book, one podcast, and one online course for entrepreneurs?
I strongly recommend all entrepreneurs to read The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. It’s a book which describes in short chapters, 99 of the most common thinking errors – simple errors all of us make in our everyday thinking – ranging from cognitive biases to envy and social distortions. Helps you become a rational thinker. The chapters are short, easy to read, and easy to take action on. You can easily read a chapter in 15 minutes while on the subway, and learn something great and immediately actionable.
If you only had $1000 dollars to start a new business, knowing everything you know now, how would you spend it?
I would spend it on taking my beloved ones, friends, and family out for dinner or meetings over coffee more often, and use these $1000 to create memorable moments we can look back in the future. It’s only with their support, love, patience, and motivation one can have a successful business.
What helps you stay driven and motivated to keep going in your business?
Some good old-fashioned classical music! Whenever I feel stuck, I like to blast classical music, it always helps me stay focused and motivated. As a musician, it’s the greatest joy to be able to sometimes take my business hat off, put my piano hat on, and just make music for a while. It always helps me to take a step back, contextualize, and solve difficult problems.
How can readers get in touch with you?
You can find me on Twitter or Instagram ( @johnozbay ), or shoot me an email at hello [at] johnozbay {dot} com, I promise I respond to every message and email, albeit sometimes a little late. You can also hear more about Cryptee on blog.crypt.ee, and stay in the know by checking out Crunchbase.
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