233: From Belarus to Canada ✈ How this Entrepreneur Grew his HuGE Private… Network | Yegor Sak of WindScribe VPN

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Background on Yegor Sak of Windscribe:

Yegor Sak is the Founder of Windscribe, which is a privacy company that offers VPN service for everyone. Yegor was born in Belarus but is currently based in Canada. As he was growing up, Yegor developed a passion for programming and creating websites. As a teenager, he did several projects that earned him some money through online ads. These side projects continued until he decided to start a software development firm, which eventually led to Windscribe. Today, they have almost 40 million account users.

Windscribe aims to develop easy-to-use yet powerful tools that allow anyone to circumvent censorship, access geographically restricted content, and minimize their exposure to marketers, criminals, and surveillance dragnets. Windscribe launched in open beta on April 14, 2016, and launched fully on April 20, 2016. As of July 2021, Windscribe has servers in 63 countries and over 110 cities.

Time-Stamped Show Notes:

  • [1:37] Yegor Sak is the Founder of Windscribe, which is a privacy company with VPN as their main service.
  • [2:34] A more in-depth explanation of what a VPN does.
  • [7:40] The image and branding of Windscribe are very much approachable with a bit of humor.
  • [10:45] Windscribe was entirely a bootstrap project and Yegor has never raised any money for it.
  • [11:46] In terms of the size of the company, they have about 35 people and they are approaching 40 million Windscribe users.
  • [15:10] Yegor discusses the difference between the free and the paid account in Windscribe.
  • [17:19] At 34 years old, Yegor has experienced a string of failures and some successes in the past.
  • [18:03] Born in Belarus, Yegor lived there for 12 years until his parents decided to move to Canada. He has no desire to go back to Belarus soon.
  • [20:24] Yegor talks about the current situation in Belarus and what’s happening to the business in this country.
  • [25:09] When they moved to Canada, Yegor became interested in computers and wanted to create websites.
  • [27:27] LMyLife.com is one of Yegor’s failed projects in the past.
  • [30:25] At 14 years old, Yegor started earning money from the websites he created.
  • [36:49] In 2004, Yegor created a website where people pay him to buy an iPod and smash it to pieces.
  • [41:54] After the iPod project, his next project was destroying gaming consoles.
  • [45:15] A good friend of Yegor runs a store in Toronto that sells weird and odd stuff. The name of his store is SkullStore.ca
  • [46:49] One of the original YouTube founders contacted Yegor to post his videos on YouTube. His Smash My PS3 video was in the top 10 YouTube videos of all time in 2016.
  • [50:10] Over the course of 2 years, his projects about smashing iPods and gaming consoles generated him about $60,000 to $80,000.
  • [52:44] When Yegor found out that he could do adult-themed websites, he started to learn how to make a program and create a dynamic website from scratch. The site he created earned him about $50,000 per month.
  • [57:17] With a lot of free time, Yegor went to college and took up Political Science and Geography.
  • [1:00:12] Being involved in airplanes since his childhood, Yegor pursued a pilot license.
  • [1:06:46] One of his failed projects involved creating a social networking site for college students.
  • [1:11:23] Yegor decided to start his own software development firm. From this venture, they were able to develop a popular app called Rap Fame.
  • [1:15:26] The next project for Yegor was a daily fantasy sports website but it did not work out. However, this failure led him to think about VPNs.
  • [1:19:34] Yegor talks about the challenges of building Windscribe in the early days.
  • [1:25:36] This is the second part of the interview where Yegor shares his views about the Russia and Ukraine situation. He decided not to terminate Russian access to Windscribe so that people in Russia can get real news outside of the Russian state media propaganda.
  • [1:29:08] Some of his employees are in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus.
  • [1:29:55] Yegor does not agree with Upwork blocking Russia and Belarus from their website.

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Fabulous 4 Questions:

  1. 📖📚 Favorite Books? Foundation Series, Predictably Irrational, SuperIntelligence, The Player of Games, Children of Time, Freakonomics, Seveneves, Dark Forest, We are Legion (We are Bob), Project Hail Mary
  2. 🙌😎 Favorite Amazon.com purchase? Anything Solar Powered
  3. 🌱💸 Favorite Tool that's GROWN your Business? Stuff You Build Yourself
  4. 💭💡 BIGGEST Challenge keeping your Business from GROWING? Being unable to use traditional marketing tools due to the nature of the service that is offered

Key Point from the Interview:

  • “Just build the damn thing yourself. Whatever money you got, ideally whatever skills you got and prove that your idea actually makes sense before raising millions of dollars, hiring 50 people, getting juicero machines, have a nice fancy office, and then you’re out of money a year later. Now you’re doing your next round and just losing more and more money all for the hope of generating revenue at some point, some time next decade potentially.”

Resources Mentioned:

 

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