Consentry

Consentry is a widget that you install on your website. That means in addition to purchasing it as a SaaS product, you need to make a minor code change before it will be live.

Because of this, documentation is a crucial part of our product. Our goal has been to make the documentation that we wish every site had. Docs that are exceedingly simple to understand, and cover all of the edge cases that users might come across.

Additionally, we believe that documentation is content. As such, it needs to be SEO-optimised, and written so that you don't need to be an expert in our product to get value.

We'd love to hear what you think. Check it out on consentry.org

Thousands of people have interacted with our cookie consent widget to date. That feels amazing!

But we still had a feeling of unease about its consistency. Sometimes it seemed to not quite behave right, and we couldn't explain it.

Today, we hopped on a three-hour call and bug bashed. We also pair-programmed the solutions. In all, we solved four significant bugs / UI compliance issues.

Learnings:
1.) We should have lots more automated testing.
2.) No matter how much you use your product, it's probably not comprehensive enough. You probably get muscle memory, and actually stop testing other usage patterns.

We're going to start doing #1, and #2 more often.

Shane and I have two meetings every day. I'm in London, and he is on the East Coast of the States. Our first call is a standup at my 1pm, and his 8am.

At today's standup, we briefly discussed implementing a new serverless deployment process that would be great to have before we have customers. Once we have customers, implementation will become harder because we risk disruption to the end user.

After a brief back-and-forth, we both definitively decided that the best thing we can do for the company is to get trading. If there's a tax on some later work because we are aggressively trying to launch, that's one we're willing to take.

It's easy to try to use your strengths (in our case, technology) to make the product better. But sometimes that can be a cop-out. We should start trading ASAP. The sooner someone says "no", the faster we can make the right product.

Even if it is a pain in the ass to deploy.

We got quite a bit of interest from people since our soft launch. Not so much customers, per se, but people interested in data privacy and the future of personal data ownership.

The most interesting outreach we got so far was actually from a competitor. They've been around for two years and wanted to chat. I suggested a call, and we hopped on for 30 minutes today. It was very flattering and validating that they found us, and we also got some good advice out of the meeting. At the same time, we established ourselves as knowlegable about the subject, and as a true player in the field.

I don't worry much about competition, but getting to talk with them about the market can be quite valuable.

Since soft-launching our site, our first and second degree connections have been coming out of the woodwork to share their troubles implementing cookie consent, and to ask for advice. Our policy thus far has been to take every meeting, and to give unbiased advice about what direction they should take.

We've had a sales meeting for each of the last two days, with both likely to result in installs, though neither for a particularly large subscription.

The danger of course is that these are smaller startups like those in the Indie Hackers community, which might not be our target market. Any validation is good, but we need to make sure we aren't getting false positives when we might not yet appeal to the mid-market that we think will be the lifeblood of our revenue.

This is the most minor vanity metric, but gives us a good feeling nonetheless: our compliance tool was used by more users in the wild that it was in our development environments yesterday and today.

Sure, this doesn't actually mean anything regarding traction or market validation, but it does mean something important: more people outside of our team are seeing and interacting with it than inside our team.

That's really what it means to launch quickly. We've gotten some great feedback, and our product roadmap is starting to be driven more and more by end users.

We're not quite set up for taking payments and having self-installs, but we're ready to get eyes on our brand and product. And to start building a list.

Consentry.org is now officially live! We're doing a soft launch by personally emailing our own rolodexes, and posting on our social media. Our goal is a modest 25 signups, which is both achievable and gets the ball rolling.

One thing that's difficult about implementing cookie consent management is making a consent manager work with your particular stack. With this in mind, we decided to produce a video series that implements Consentry in ten minutes or less for specific, oft-used stacks.

We just cut a draft of our first video: adding GDPR-compliant cookie consent on your Squarespace site in under ten minutes using Consentry, Segment, and GA.

We'd love feedback on the style before we launch the full series on Youtube.

https://consentry.wistia.com/medias/bw0x07jc5k

By late February, the 2019/2020 COVID-19 pandemic was starting to take hold here in the UK. I had a job offer, but with everyone working from home, it wasn't quite time for me to start working.

We used this opportunity for the both of us to start working full-time on Consentry. After all, I'm in London and Shane is in New Hampshire: we were already a remote-first company.

We installed the cookie consent manager in two production sites, and begun to make improvements.

At the same time, we began to work on our brand, positioning, and marketing site. we targeted launch for some time in April.

Cookie popups won't be around forever. In fact, they probably won't be around for more than 5 years.

We decided that we weren't a cookie popup company. Consentry helps businesses build trust by respecting their users' data preferences. In time, we believe that this means that the consent model will actually flip, and users will be asking businesses for something in return for responsible use of their data.

This means that users need to trust Consentry to broker this deal. If we were to become a venture-backed, Silicon Valley-style tech company, the company's motivations wouldn't be any more pure than the companies we were protecting against.

We decided we would incorporate as a non-profit, here in the UK. That doesn't mean we can't eventually pay ourselves and our team good salaries, it just means that we don't distribute equity, or dividends on our profit. All profit would be re-invested in our team, product, and causes we believe in.

In the immediate term, being a non-profit has two major benefits: there are loads of SaaS tools that are free or reduced-rate for non-profits; and we get to use consentry.org.