Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: All word-of-mouth advertising is seeded somewhere. How did you seed your word-of-mouth campaign?

David Gorodyansky: I think it just kind of took off. I would love to identify a specific news article or event that made it happen, but I am not sure what that is. I know that it started taking off very fast like Twitter and Facebook.

Sramana Mitra: Facebook had a clear strategy about how they took off. They went campus by campus.

David Gorodyansky: In the early days we did talk to a lot of Wi-Fi networks such as coffee houses. We got them to put a link on their start pages. When people went to their Wi-Fi hotspots they would see AnchorFree on the front page. We are still at the San Jose airport, and we went live there in 2007. Those places realized that they needed security and we were a way for them to offer security to their users free. I think that was the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: You said you look at your total addressable market in two parts. The first was the 800 million people who use security products. What is the second part?

David Gorodyansky: There are 600 million people in emerging markets that are faced with censorship. They can get online but are restricted as to where they can go.

Sramana Mitra: How do they find out about you?

David Gorodyansky: In that case they can only find out by word of mouth. In this case you don’t have to write a whitepaper. If they want to get to Facebook, then they can just install our software and suddenly they can get there.

Sramana Mitra: Somebody in those markets had to figure out that it was possible by using your software. You didn’t figure that out because your customers figured that strategy out for you. Do you know how your customers discovered AnchorFree?

David Gorodyansky: I don’t know. One of our guys was testing different things and talking to users online when someone told him in chat that he used our product to access Facebook in China. We then found out that you can get YouTube in Turkey and Skype in Saudi Arabia. We did not have to explain to anybody what the software does, they just got it. They figured that out very easily.

Sramana Mitra: That is very powerful for those cases.

David Gorodyansky: Yes, it is very powerful for those users. It took off very fast due to the security context. We played a key role this year in the revolutions in Egypt, Tunisia and throughout the Middle East. People were using the product to bypass the censorship. Even last year during the Iranian election there was a lot of press about Facebook and Twitter helping groups to organize. The question is, how did people get to Facebook and Twitter? They got there by using AnchorFree.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA
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