The BEST Private Search Engine For Online Privacy & Security (DuckDuckGo 2020) | My First Million

They average 62 million queries per day. I have no idea. I mean, what do you think Google's queries per day? Probably like, like 5 billion.

Okay, let's start with DuckDuckGo.

Okay. I've, um, I was on the James Altucher podcast. James was here with us a few weeks ago. James is like a, like a dork nerdy guy. I say this with love. I like him a lot. He's like a nerdy guy, libertarian guy, libertarian audience. And I can't decide if this whole privacy stuff that we're talking about. So hey.com email service launched a few days ago, a few weeks ago, a week ago. Its premise is like, we're gonna— one of its many promises is it's on privacy.

Okay.

Right. And so I'm really into this privacy thing. The founder of Pandora told me that he is seeing his customers who are middle America people actually care about privacy. And when I was on my trip, I saw DuckDuckGo billboards everywhere. For those who don't know, DuckDuckGo, it's a Google competitor. It's a search engine. And they— it's all based on— they don't track you, which like fucking ruins the business model. I have no idea how they make money.

But no, no, it doesn't. So their thing was like, um, it's not no ads. So they still do search ads, but they're like, look, when you search for— you said you're gonna go buy a new car— when you go search for, you know, Mercedes versus BMW or whatever you're gonna search for, they'll serve you an ad. They just don't need to know that you're Sam Parr, that you live in this place, that you have a wife, you know, they don't need the personal data for the ads to still be effective because search is high intent. They know what you're looking for so they can serve you a relevant ad. And their insight was the slight drop-off you get by not personalizing is not so bad if that can become your value proposition, that hey, we're not using personal information to serve these ads.

Okay, so I just sent you their traffic. So go to duckduckgo.com/traffic. Um, so here's my question to you.

First of all, we're looking at a hockey stick. We're looking at phenomenal. 2010, they're at, you know, um, this is, this is queries per day, or this is average?

Yeah, so, uh, they average 62 million queries per day. I have no idea. I mean, what do you think Google's queries per day? Probably like, like 5 billion.

Yeah, insane. Let's— I mean, uh, see if you can find— see if you can find Google's queries today so we could put this— so 3.5 billion per day.

Okay.

Um, okay. Yes, good.

Google or DuckDuckGo is at 50, 60 million a day, so they're, uh, I don't even know what's that, like 3% the size. Um, anyway, DuckDuckGo, what do you think about that? I, I am— I, I personally love this. And what I want to know from you is, do you like DuckDuckGo? And do you also think this privacy thing, like building products where the main feature or values in like, or like the main thing the brand stands for is privacy, do you think that's going to be a hit?

I think it's a hit. I used to think the opposite. I used to be of the camp that was like, uh, look, people don't give a shit. Like if you just say, yeah, sure, in theory people want privacy if you offer no privacy or privacy, but when it comes down to products, they're like, oh, this is a free good thing and I have to give up all my data? All right, here you go. And so I used to think that people in practice were willing to easily trade privacy, and I think that's still true on the whole. But if you said, yes, where is the pendulum swinging? And so I think the pendulum is swinging more towards people caring about privacy because every— these things stack up, right? So as you, you know, the more paranoid you get, the less lack of trust you have in the system and of the, of the big companies. It doesn't matter, you don't have to know which one is the straw that breaks the camel's back. Maybe it's the fake news stuff on Facebook, maybe it's when your information gets breached for the 35th time and you get an email saying, hey, sorry, your personal info might have been leaked. Like you don't know where it is, but these things just keep happening and to the point where I believe people care more than they did before and they'll continue to care more. That's number one. Number two, you have to do it on a global product. Like a product everybody uses, 'cause it's still a niche audience, right? Like you said, Google is about 50 times the search query size than DuckDuckGo. So like 50 to 1. And so you need a product that's used by pretty much everybody for those ones to add up and be a big enough market for you. So I wouldn't do it on some niche products like, oh, you do some niche milling, Mailchimp software thing. Cool, I'm gonna make a privacy-focused version. It's like, no, that's, that's a niche of a niche.

Well, but if you take a niche of a mainstream, it works. Like hey.com— I call it hey.com because I don't want to call it email.

Email is global, right? Email is everybody.

Yes, it is global, but like you don't need that many users to build a billion-dollar company.

Totally. What I'm— that's what I'm saying though. You need to— you're only going to get the sort of 2%, let's say, that value privacy enough to make a change. Um, and so, you know, like Superhuman did the same thing. Email is such a huge market. Cool, we'll go get the 1%, 2% who are willing to pay $30 a month for a free— instead of free email. And so I think that's the same thing happening here.

Abreu, how old are you?

27.

You're a little old for this question. Um, the Zoomers—

back to 5 years ago.

No, it's a generational thing. I want to know, do the 22-year-olds give a shit about this? Because the way that the Zoomers, the way that they live and think is—

dude, they don't give a shit about getting coronavirus. I don't know, man. The privacy of their data, they don't care about their body.

They're a pretty conscientious group of people, I think. I don't know. I would— I want to know how they think. But that was my question. Okay, so here's another private— here's another opportunity for privacy that I'm interested in. Do you know that when you go to Safeway— so in California we have Safeway, in the South you've got Kroger, Kroger. In the other South, you've got Publix. What else is there?

Albertsons.

Albertsons. Okay. So when you go to your grocery store, like your major grocery store, you enter in your phone number to get a discount, right? What they do with that is they understand your buying behavior and they'll show you, they'll send you stuff in the mail or they will just learn about inventory, whatever. And this is incredibly effective. So effective that there's a famous story about a woman being a 16-year-old woman getting mailed stuff to her dad's home saying, like baby supplies. And the dad was like, right, hey, my daughter's 16, she's not pregnant. What are you talking about? Turns out she was pregnant and they knew it because in your target— yeah, yeah, month, you know what to buy. Uh, anyway, um, when you go and buy that shit, did you know that you can submit like a request and they'll send you all of your—

a do not track request?

Well, that you could do a do not track and they can send you everything you've ever bought.

Oh, that's pretty cool. Okay, I like that.

So What, what would you do with that data?

Yeah, I think that's just an interesting thing you could do in general, like a Mint.com style. I think you could say, hey, what's your phone number? Okay, then you go request it on behalf of the customer and you give them cool visualizations about their spending patterns over time and other products they might like. But, um, I don't— what do you— would I— what would I do with that data if I was the company or if I was myself?

What do you think if you're trying to build a business?

I would go figure out other areas where this sort of like linking and tracking will work. And so, so a lot of people have already done this, right? Like the ad market, it's kind of like porn where porn innovates first. Okay, a close second or third might be the ad market. So, you know, Furkan, who was kind of my co-founder, CTO of my previous company, his previous company was an ad tech company. And they— one of the versions of their app that they made, so the company's called Applovin. And so initially the premise was, what apps are your friends loving? We will recommend those apps to you. And so it was like, if I know what apps you have and I know that you're my friend because you're in my address book, then it can tell me that Sam Parr loves this app.

I thought it was a play on McLovin.

No, it was— I don't know, maybe that was a side benefit because everybody loves Superbad. But, um, one of— but then all kinds of little edge cases started fucking them up, so they would you know, record— they would tell me that you love Grindr or whatever, right? Like, so, so first it's like not everybody's app behavior they want to be transparent to their friends or their contacts. And I think there was one really horrible case where this— so then they switched to trying to do this for app installs. So they're like, okay, if I'm playing a game and it's awesome— or sorry, forget about it's awesome— I'm playing a game and they want you to download that game because they get paid $9 if you download the game. They would show my face from your address book as, hey, Sean's playing Candy Crush right now, tap here to play Candy Crush too. And that was like a super effective ad unit, like they were like printing money. And I think something really bad happened where like the CEO of Expedia or something like that got an ad that like his deceased wife was playing this game or something like that, like someone from his address book who had this app was shown to him and he's like, what the hell is this? And so it got back to them and they had to turn it off. And they did a similar experiment around location tracking, like kind of a Life360 thing. So you gotta be really careful with these like data— oh, let's use data to give you information about either yourself or others. Uh, you can get the situation like the dad who finds out his 16-year-old's pregnant.

Yeah, I, uh, long story short, privacy.

I have a privacy idea for you. I love I have a privacy idea for you. So I just got to—

I think it's just because I've become like, I like, I've, the older I've gotten, I've gotten like more libertarian and like fuck the government, like mentality.

Well, there's two things that are happening. There's people who become a libertarian, which is like F the government and F the man in general. And then there's people who are becoming more nationalistic, which is like, it's us versus them. And us versus them means sort of keep them out and raise us up. And I think in both cases, you see this sort of like retreat In both cases, it's a sort of— it's not like a shelter-in-place physically, but it's a shelter-in-place sort of psychologically, behaviorally, where you reduce your, like, openness and your spread, you know, in your behaviors, in your data, in other ways. So I think people in general, when times get a little crazy, people have— there's a flight to safety. And I see— I think you see this with investing. I think you see this with the way people act and behave. So I think that more people do it when they're— when times get turbulent. Now, a privacy-focused idea that I had the other day. So moved into this new house, need to get internet set up. Oh shit, gotta play the Comcast game. Comcast comes over, and of course, you know, Wi-Fi doesn't really work great in my house. So I was like, okay, I need to invest in good Wi-Fi because not having good Wi-Fi is like not having water to drink. And so I'm like looking for these like Eero, these kind of mesh networks that you use in your house. I just bought one, give you more coverage. So I just bought Eero. But I was talking to Furkan and I was like, I think Eero sucks. Well, I hope it doesn't suck because I just bought it. But the idea that I was thinking about was, um, you know how when you— what typically happens, you have your Wi-Fi router and then on your laptop you'll have like a VPN. So a lot of people have VPNs. VPNs are more and more popular. Some people have it for work, some people have it to hide their traffic as they go bootleg movies on the internet and they don't want it to be sort of traced to them. And so, um VPNs are kind of complicated, like, to set up. Like, you got to download one, you don't know if it's malware, you're setting it up. The average person doesn't even know what the hell VPN is. I was asking—

I've done a ton of research on this market.

Well, the idea was actually, why don't you build VPN into the router so you never need to download anything? It's just VPN by default, and it's built into the hardware itself. And so you actually— the, the value prop of the router is This is secure internet. And so there— so he— so Furkan, of course, was like, you know, there's people doing this. And so I, I can't say I'm the first to have this idea, but he was telling me about a couple companies to check out if you're interested in this. So, uh, NextDNS is one of them, Ubiquiti is another one. Um, and so he was showing me a few of these that today are still kind of like, you kind of need to be a developer to, A, know about these, or B, like, know how to configure them to set them up. And so I think if somebody takes the Eero level of simplicity and design but they make the value prop, hey, your, your internet search traffic, your whatever you're doing on the internet is private if you buy this box instead of that box. I think people can get behind that.

The hard thing about these companies— so first of all, the VPN businesses, I did a— I wrote about them because I think that it's going to explode, um, and they already are exploding, uh, but a lot of them are based in Panama because of the privacy laws there, and a lot of them are notoriously scammy and weird. They're also ridiculously profitable. Like I talked to the one guy, he had one that made $200 million a year in revenue and like $100 million in profit, like stupid. But Eero, do you remember, you know, Eero got bought by Google, I think.

Amazon, I think.

Amazon. It like got acquired for nothing. These companies are so hard to make money because it costs so much money.

Right, yeah, I think hardware is hard. Everybody knows that. Like Ring doorbell, you know, it gets a billion-dollar outcome, but like, I don't think it was like ultra profitable at the time. I think it was strategic, the reason it got bought. But the reason I think Wi-Fi router is interesting, because Wi-Fi is like email, it's like Google search, it's a thing that everybody has. Every physical place has a router. And so the 2% of that market that cares about privacy, I think it's still a big market. And I think, I don't believe that it's so hard to make money because again, you like with this Comcast box that I have here, I gotta pay these guys $14 a month just for this router to sit here. There's no way this router is worth more than like $50, but they're gonna make money on me, you know, they'll break even in 5 months and they know I'm never gonna like get rid of my router. And so, yeah, I think that there's something interesting there.

Yeah, also fuck those guys.

Yeah.