Connect your Claude, Codex or OpenClaw for full transcripts on millions of podcasts. Two week free trial, cancel anytime.

Start free trial →
JE Jack Ellis On The Bootstrapped Founder

“I call privacy the political equalizer because both sides care. I mean, we've had political parties, and we've not worked with any of them, but political parties contact us because we have that privacy thing.”

The Bootstrapped Founder · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · May 2023

“I call privacy the political equalizer because both sides care. I mean, we've had political parties, and we've not worked with any of them, but political parties contact us because we have that privacy thing.” — Jack Ellis, The Bootstrapped Founder

Context

Asked whether customers are becoming more aware of privacy, Ellis says yes, and argues that privacy concerns cut across political lines.

Transcript

The Bootstrapped Founder Around 30:11 into the episode
Speaker 2

…done something there, which will be interesting to a lot of people when it drops. But I wouldn't say they made it hard necessarily. The OAuth stuff, I thought they made that unnecessarily complex with the approval process for an application. But no, there's no evil play there that I can comment on.

Speaker 1

…that was very welcomed by a lot of people in the European IT industry and beyond as well. So I see that there are the legal limits to what you can do. But do you see also from the customer side that people are becoming more aware of the necessity of privacy? Is that something you see in the future?

Speaker 2

…she was so concerned by the fact that it said hello and then her name on a random website and it was like linked to her Facebook. That really bothered her. And so people are, even she was becoming more aware of what was going on. And so people expect privacy. Some people People don't, and that's fine. Like, you know, everyone's got a different opinion. One thing I will say, though, I call it, I call privacy the political equalizer because both sides care. I mean, we've had political parties, and we've not worked with any of them, but political parties contact us because we have that privacy thing. So it's a political equalizer, which is also interesting, I think. And I think people, the awareness will continue to grow, especially with Facebook behaving bad. People are sick of their data being sold. You know, and if you're not, then you won't use Fathom and you won't pay attention. And that's fine too. I'm not trying to persuade anyone. We get people come to us because they already know…

Speaker 1

Yeah, that's a growing awareness. I think I see that not only in websites and cookie tracking and that stuff. I see it in emails too, like particularly sending out newsletters to thousands of people, right? The number of people who block all email tracking is climbing significantly. And thanks to…

Speaker 2

And I think, so I'm still working, always working on my thoughts, but I think I disagree with David on the all tracking's bad. So where I go with this, you remember Superhuman when it came out, they were tracking where you were when you opened it. That was bad. And that really played into what Hey…

Speaker 1

It's super nuanced, right? Like, privacy. Privacy is not all or nothing. Like, it's mostly about agencies. That's kind of, that's what I feel. Like, my agency to determine what I want to give to whom, that's kind of where my privacy begins and ends, right? On both sides of the spectrum. And I would…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

More from The Bootstrapped Founder