On 11 April, the government informed the Supreme Court that it would introduce the Digital Personal Data Protection Bill 2022 during the monsoon session of Parliament. The Bill proposes to recognize personal privacy, and at the same time, it defines the scope of processing personal information for legal purposes.
For San Francisco, California-based Skiff, this development was particularly exciting. A privacy-respecting startup, Skiff provides end-to-end encrypted email service and collaboration platform.
End-to-end encryption means that no one, including the service provider, can access user information on the platform.
The startup hopes that the growing awareness about data security and privacy will attract Indians to companies like theirs. In fact, Skiff is betting big on the possibilities that this legislation could open up for its business as it expects India to be one of its biggest revenue contributors in the coming years.
Last week, the startup quietly launched its collaboration and productivity suite of apps for Android and Windows specifically tailored for Indian users.
“Data security is a massive awakening about data and privacy. India, in particular, has gone through a big moment of sorts on that in the last two years. This helped us build our suite of products,” Skiff co-founder and CEO Andrew Milich said in a virtual chat. your story,
L to R: Skiff co-founders, Andrew Milich (CEO) and Jason Ginsberg (CTO)
Initial setup and traction
Founded in 2020 by Stanford graduates Milich and Jason Ginsberg (Chief Technology Officer), Skiff launched its first product page in 2021 for writing and collaborating on notes, documents and wikis.
Then came Mail, Calendar, and Drive—all end-to-end encrypted, private, and launched in different months last year.
“We run our own SMTP (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol which enables sending and receiving of mail) server. We do not use any third party service for that. This allows us to further secure users’ data,” says Arpit Kale, Founding Engineer and Head of Infrastructure, Skiff.
On Skiff, users are not required to part with any information—personal or otherwise—to sign up for its products. All they have to do is create an account with their username and password. The startup says it does not have access to any user’s email, documents, calendars and files.
For example, tech giant Alphabet offers workspace and productivity tools. In 2018, it had nearly 1.5 billion Gmail users – the largest for any email service provider globally – but the company has faced criticism for spying on its users and selling their information to advertisers on more than one occasion .
Besides this, its list of competitors also includes end-to-end encrypted email provider ProtonMail and Zoho Mail, created by Chennai-based software firm Zoho of the same name.
Skiff offers workspace collaboration, which ProtonMail lacks, and end-to-end encryption by default without any setup, which Zoho doesn’t offer. Instead, it provides some element of encryption integration based on user setup.
“So, we have software companies, media companies, journalists, writers, authors, researchers, crypto companies, etc. who value that kind of control over their data. It’s a lot about peace of mind,” Milich They say.
The startup has made it easy to import anyone’s email account from Google, Outlook and ProtonMail. In a two-step process, download all folders—notes, documents, and files—from Google Drive and upload them to Skiff Drive.
Additionally, Skiff’s suite of products includes a Web3 component. “Our storage is decentralized. Users have the option of storing all data on decentralized storage and not even on our servers,” says Kale.
“Even if Skif ceases to exist, you can still go, use the same key, decrypt the data, and download it locally if you want.” Can,” he added.
In addition, the startup has wallet integrations with MetaMask and Brave Wallet, enabling users to sign in to its suite of products through the latter’s platform, with “complete privacy, ownership and unique recognition of their identity.” capacity to claim”. One of Skiff’s blog posts.
It has partnered with Coinbase Commerce, which allows businesses to accept payments in various cryptocurrencies, to create a crypto-payment system that respects privacy. Skif users can make purchases using the wallet of their choice or using their Coinbase account, which provides added security and helps reduce their digital footprint.
screenshot of skiff mail
Why India?
Skiff was building for iOS users from the beginning, given that Apple’s mobile operating system dominates in the United States.
As it tries to decide its strategy for its next wave of growth between December 2022 and January this year, Skiff realized it received the second largest amount of traffic from Indian and European users – around 10% each.
Of its 650,000 users, Skiff sees 53% Windows users and 18% Android users, while iOS users represent 11% of the total user base.
Milich explains, “There was a realization that since everyone deserves privacy, we need to meet people where they are, and Windows/Android is clearly more relevant in the Indian context.”
With the Indian user in mind, half of Skiff’s 20-member team, 15 of whom are full-time employees, began building Android and Windows apps with specific tweaks.
These include infrastructure changes to reduce app-load times and a new user interface. It also made changes to its offline support, where one can read their existing emails and send calendar invites without being connected to the Internet. Also, these will be available globally.
“It takes four to five months to build an app, and when we decide to revamp the app, it is a huge commitment. It’s almost as if the company has to be successful in order to survive. So, we made a really big bet that we needed to reinvent the app to be successful in India and hopefully some of our low-traffic countries in the future,” Milich says.
For its India launch, Skiff has set aside around $500,000 to invest over the next six months, which includes social media campaigns and marketing spend in India.
Support in some of the major Indian languages is on Skiff’s product roadmap. The company intends to register an entity in India and hire a team in a few years, depending on the traction it receives from users.
For now, it is betting big on major Indian cities to drive adoption of its Workspace product suite, hoping that awareness of data security and privacy will catch up with the rest of the time.
It hopes to add at least five million users over the next two to three years — about one to two million from India alone. While Indian users account for about 10% of the startup’s total users, the team hopes to double that by next year.
Screenshot of the Skiff page (for writing and collaborating on notes, docs, and wikis)
What will happen next?
The California-based startup has raised $23 million in two funding rounds from Sequoia Capital, Neo, Ethereum Foundation and investors such as John Lilly (former CEO, Mozilla) and Balaji Srinivasan (former CTO, Coinbase).
Milich says most of the money is still unspent, largely because of the Skiff’s low operating costs. It will be invested in better product capabilities, including adding advanced features Google Workspace users are familiar with and some aimed at enterprise users (think: direct competition from Google Workspace) and, simply, pushing the idea of user privacy .
With a product-based approach, Skiff is investing heavily in social media campaigns to smooth the user experience and collect feedback and better understand its users. In addition, it is laying the groundwork for “good customer service to provide feedback to help people have a good experience”.
Also, the team relies on referrals as a channel, offering $10 for downloading its apps for Android/iOS or if a friend signs up based on a referral code and downloads files from Google Drive. Offers $15 to import.
Skiff hopes to entice individual users in the first phase of its go-to-market strategy, with businesses expected to follow suit. Once it reaches one million users, it plans to go aggressively with the business segment.
Milich says Skiff’s pricing plans, launched last October-November, are similar to Google’s and Outlook’s workspace suite of products.
With ambitious goals of growing at least 3-4 times in the next 12-18 months, the startup hopes to have “a few million sign-ups” and cross the five million mark in 2-3 years. And India is the kingpin for startups in this journey.
