SimpleLogin

After watching Edward Snowden's documentary, Son realized that privacy wasn't just an abstract concept—it had real, concrete consequences. He was a heavy Gmail user and understood that his Gmail account had become his de facto online identity across the internet. The insight was simple but powerful: to truly protect his privacy, he needed different identities on different sites. This realization, combined with seeing password managers like Dashlane and 1Password raise over $100M, convinced him there was a massive market opportunity in privacy tools.

Son quit his well-paying job leading a software team to focus fully on SimpleLogin. His initial vision was to build a single sign-on button—similar to "Login with Facebook" but privacy-respecting—that would create a different email identity each time. He spent months building an OAuth2/OpenID Connect identity provider from scratch. Then in June 2019, Apple announced "Sign in with Apple" at WWDC, which was essentially the same product. Rather than being devastated, Son recognized this as market validation: Apple's move proved that privacy-focused login solutions were desperately needed.

Realizing the identity provider approach faced a chicken-and-egg problem (apps wouldn't adopt without users; users wouldn't know about it without apps), Son pivoted to focus on the email alias core of the product. Crucially, he kept SimpleLogin fully open-source from day one. This transparency decision, while initially scary, became one of his best moves—it attracted early adopters who believed in the mission and spent significant time improving the product. Eventually, three more people joined part-time, and the team built iOS/Android apps, browser extensions, and advanced features like PGP and WebAuthn support.

Son's growth was entirely organic and word-of-mouth driven. He launched on HackerNews and BetaPage but these efforts "were never a real success"—likely due to poor product explanation or bad timing. His turning point came through content marketing. Having no formal marketing background, Son focused on what he knew: writing technical content about SimpleLogin's development and engineering challenges. He posted on dev.to initially, then moved to SimpleLogin's own blog.

The real breakthrough came when privacy influencers like Techlore (100K YouTube subscribers) and Michael Bazzell (author of security/privacy books) reviewed SimpleLogin positively. These reviews generated visible traffic spikes. Son also offered the premium plan free to students, which likely contributed to word-of-mouth spread through that community. By the time of the interview, he was experimenting with a referral program, which showed promising early results.

The biggest mistake Son made was spending too much time on the single sign-on vision without validating it with app owners. His brilliant idea became a distraction because he didn't talk to the people who would actually need to integrate it. The HackerNews launches flopped—he hypothesizes that timing matters enormously and recommends deleting posts immediately if they don't get traction in 15-30 minutes.

What worked was the open-source approach, content marketing, and influencer partnerships. The freemium pricing model ($3/month or $30/year premium, with unlimited forwarding on the free tier) allowed users to experience the core value before paying. Reddit and Twitter communities became valuable sources of user feedback and validation.

SimpleLogin reached $3,000 MRR with roughly 1,000 subscribers at the time of the interview. Son deliberately kept growth controlled—he had no ambition to "go big or go home." The team was still small and bootstrapped with zero external investment. Son was actively looking for a marketing partner so he could focus 100% on product and technology. The team was also exploring adjacent markets like privacy-focused credit card and phone number solutions, though these presented country-specific challenges.