Duck Tales: Why DuckDuckGo acquired Removaly to expand its privacy offering (Ep.19)

In this episode, Cristina (CMO) and John (Marketing, previously co-founder of Removaly) discuss the acquisition process, adjusting to DuckDuckGo culture, and how Removaly has informed our customer service and product strategy.

Disclaimers: (1) The audio, video (above), and transcript (below) are unedited and may contain minor inaccuracies or transcription errors. (2) This website is operated by Substack. This is their privacy policy.

Show notes: Learn more about the DuckDuckGo Subscription, including Personal Information Removal.

Cristina Hi, and welcome to DuckTales, where we go behind the scenes at DuckDuckGo and discuss the stories, technology, and people that help build privacy tools for everyone. In each episode, you’ll hear from employees about our vision, product updates, engineering, or approach to AI. I’m Cristina on the marketing team, and today we’ll be talking to John about DuckDuckGo’s acquisition of Removaly, where John was a co-founder and is how we were lucky enough to get him on our team. John, would you like to say hi and introduce yourself?

John Yeah, absolutely. I’m John Bourscheid. I’m also on the marketing and communications team. I dabble in basically everything digital marketing, customer support, SEO, and I’m really glad to be here.

Cristina Thank you, John. So in 2022, DuckDuckGo made our first acquisition, Removaly, to accelerate building the DuckDuckGo subscription, which today includes a VPN, personal information removal, identity theft restoration, and advanced AI models. So John, first question is an easy one. What was Removaly? What problem was it solving?

John Yeah, absolutely. Removaly was a small startup in the data removal space. It was geared towards helping users remove their personal information from data brokers and people search sites quickly, effectively, and completely hands off. We automated the removal process. We provided users with real-time dashboards on removal progress, and we scanned daily to ensure that removed personal information stayed offline. Opting out of those sites manually is pretty complex, which is where services like ours came in.

As far as problems, our user base really faced like a full variety of problems from general avoidance of public facing personal details to more proactive removal just for privacy sake to reactive responses from things like doxing, swatting, stalking, you name it, honestly.

Cristina Yeah, those are scary, serious problems. Even for someone who hasn’t faced those problems, but is just on a search for their name, it’s super creepy having all that info show.

John Yeah.

Cristina So what was it like building and scaling Removaly?

John It was awesome. My co-founder Kyle and I, we were the only two employees at Removaly outside of an awesome part-time support specialist we hired towards our final months of operation. So Kyle and I started kind of ideating in late 2019. At the time we both had full-time jobs, so it was more of a side project for us. The business was just bootstrapped by Kyle and I from day one. We put our own money into it and we never raised any investor money at any point.

So we spent 18 months building and testing the product. Kyle handled the full stack of our dashboards and automations, and I built our public facing site and handled the marketing, communications, and growth aspects. We dabbled in each other’s spaces just to kind of test and validate things. And at the time we were the only US-based and self-funded data removal service, as well as the only service that scanned daily. And I think we still were. As far as scaling goes, we focused mostly on content marketing in the interest of both costs and longevity.

We offered free opt-out guides for every site that we covered with our paid service. We did comparison guides between us and competing services, and we offered extensive privacy resources. That content quality really led to extensive organic traffic for relevant search terms, and then active engagement in communities such as IndieHackers, Reddit, and Twitter really helped us grow via word of mouth. But besides the daily scanning, our other main differentiator was support.

While there were only two of us working on Removaly part-time, we offered Live Chat, which was super effective in gaining insights into what our existing and our prospective users were looking for in a service. We took this feedback to heart and we used it to iterate on our own product wherever we possibly could. While it definitely made the scaling aspect super difficult, it really wasn’t impossible, it was just exhausting. And this is honestly one of the main reasons that Kyle and I followed through with getting acquired by DuckDuckGo.

Cristina That does sound exhausting, but kudos for really listening to users and really wanting them.

John Absolutely.

Cristina What were your initial thoughts and what was the acquisition process like?

John The first signal we got was several DuckDuckGo team members signed up for Removaly on the same day, including our founder Gabriel. When DuckDuckGo first reached out to connect with us, we kind of assumed that they were looking at offering our services to their employees as we were actively working on entering the B2B space with Removaly. Whenever they reached out and floated an acquisition, we discussed it a lot.

Everyone we interacted with on the DuckDuckGo team was awesome and the acquisition process went relatively smoothly. It was extensive and thorough for sure. It took about six months from start to finish, but we brought on a guy named Sean Flynn to assist from a mergers and acquisitions perspective as it was totally new territory for both Kyle and I. And he did a great job helping guide us through the process to an amicable conclusion. This is kind of where I dropped the big claim to fame that Kyle and I have of we never met in person until the day we had acquired. In fact, the entire Removaly product was built and for the first year it was run without us even having a phone call. The whole thing was done on Slack.

Cristina That’s incredible. And it reminds me of DuckDuckGo’s founder and first employee meeting online. I guess it meant you were well prepared to work in our fully remote company.

John Yeah, for sure.

Cristina So what was it like joining DuckDuckGo, figuring out our culture, processes, and going from a team of two to 200?

John To be honest, the way things that are configured and structured here made it a breeze. Every aspect of DuckDuckGo is meticulous, it’s thorough, and it’s well documented. So learning the ropes here was super simple compared to prior workplaces I’ve been at, at least in my experience. The culture here is really unlike anything I’ve ever experienced anywhere I’ve ever worked. Having built Removaly entirely on Slack, we got used to documenting everything we did.

This translated super well to DuckDuckGo’s cultural strategy of working in the open, which makes questioning assumptions and validating direction a really natural step in the process.

Cristina Did anything surprise you?

John To be candid, we first assumed that the privacy first aspect of DuckDuckGo was less important than dollars, as is the case with pretty much every other tech company we came across.

After all, how could a company really have such name recognition and growth with so few employees while leaving a bunch of money on the table? But after we digested the company culture and the processes and the principles and how things are run, it was obvious that we were way off in that assumption. I’ve really never seen a company like this where we just truly take privacy seriously, put it at the forefront of everything we do and do so purposefully, even at the detriment of revenue. It’s really impressive and admirable. And I’m really glad to be able to be part of a great crew.

The motto that we don’t track our users is not really just fly by night. It really is how we do things here. And it consistently impresses me even over three years into this.

Cristina I agree. And what can I say except we talk the talk, we walk the walk. As challenging as it can be, it’s a big part of what makes working at DuckDuckGo so special.

John For sure. Yep.

Cristina So how has Removaly informed DuckDuckGo’s personal information removal?

John Yeah, so the initial plan was to deconstruct Removaly completely and then rebuild it with stronger privacy controls and rebuild it on device, which was and still is a major differentiator in this data removal space. For a bit, I was focused on assisting in this endeavor wherever possible using my very, very scattered skill set. The on-device aspect was pivotal to truly ensure users’ privacy, and it took a ton of development and testing to make it a reality.

There was, to me, a lot of awe and admiration that I felt watching Kyle essentially build a business from scratch by hand in 18 months with Removaly. I really got to relive that from a totally different perspective watching several of the most talented developers and designers I’ve ever seen do it all over again on steroids. It was super, super cool to watch.

Cristina So what’s next for personal information removal?

John The data removal space has gotten super turbulent in the past few years to the point where some of our competitors have shut their doors completely. It’s a constant battle with people search sites to effectively and automatically process and submit these opt out requests for people. Despite this, we’ve kept our heads above water. We figured out connections between sites and we’ve been reworking our processes to effectively continue to remove personal information automatically for our subscribers.

The regulatory space for data brokers is also changing constantly. We’ve been working on collaborating with other services and regulatory agencies on the most effective ways to keep this dissemination of personal information at bay. So it’s a constant battle, but we’re in the fight for the long haul.

Cristina Yeah, a never-ending challenge, isn’t it? I love looking at my dashboard and seeing removed, all clear, but I know there’s a lot of work to keep it that way.

John Truly. It sure is. Yeah, there’s a whole factory behind the scenes working on it.

Cristina Well, the last thing I want to touch on is that Removaly was known for customer support. How has that transferred to DuckDuckGo?

John Yeah, okay, so I mentioned our customer support briefly a little bit ago. That was another piece that I really wanted to foster at DuckDuckGo. And to do so, I helped lead the charge to develop our streamlined customer support strategy for this subscription. Then I kind of stepped into a pseudo support specialist role and over time I’ve cleared, I think it’s about 14,000 tickets and user concerns across the subscription space one-on-one while also contributing elsewhere across the company.

The support aspect was really critical to me and my own convictions when it came to running and growing a successful subscription product. And I’ve been a vocal, probably annoying at sometimes, proponent of a customer first focus for the subscription and beyond. This kind of translated really well into a well-rounded support experience that balances both effort and quality. We now have an awesome support team here, and I’m really excited to see how we can continue to grow and adapt as the company continues to increase its visibility globally.

Cristina Yeah, the volume you mentioned is just staggering. And when you co-hosted a customer support session at our meetup, it was really eye-opening for me, both in terms of how tricky it can be sometimes with edge case questions, but also the care you and the team put into helping people and delivering that real human touch.

John Most definitely, yeah. There’s a lot of nuance involved and I treat every one like it’s a puzzle that we’re trying to solve.

Cristina Yeah, indeed. Well, John, thank you so much for sharing your experience about the acquisition. I think it’s a great story. And I’m so thankful for it, not only because of what it did for our personal information removal product, but also because now we have you on the marketing team.

John I’m so happy to be here, honestly.

Cristina Awesome. Well, for those watching, we have many more DuckTale episodes in the works and I plan to be back for some more. So see you then. Bye.

John Thank you, see ya.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit insideduckduckgo.substack.com