Read your reviews and rivals' reviews, then fix what people complain about

Tanuj Chatterjee… on the top. We didn't start trying out to be the biggest VPN. My background, just FYI, is engineering and product. Before getting into the VPN world, I was CTO at Rakuten where we grew the company from $30 million in revenue to billion dollars in revenue in the US. A lot of lessons learned around the consumer DNA then. And given my background, I think very bottom-up rather than marketing down, sometimes to a fault, but it has served us well.

Tanuj ChatterjeeSo we basically looked at the app, started looking at the reviews right away, started looking at our competitor's reviews right away to see what's missing in our app, not in terms of feature functionality, but, "What are people complaining about?" And we started fixing those things. We started removing friction. And then we started reading the competitor's reviews in terms of, "What are the challenges over there that we can fix and resolve?"

Tanuj ChatterjeeWe basically built an app which was very, very high-quality. I say to people sometimes, "VPN apps are commodity," as you know, right? It's very easy. The open source scores glow in the internet, so you can find and build a VPN app in two weeks. The first 85% is very easy, but after that, every 1% is hard work.

David BarnardThat's a crazy story from app acquisition to spun out to the top VPN app with a billion downloads. That's crazy. Early on you were just on commodity hardware. When did things start picking up? What was the inflection point? What happened that really started to move the needle? And then when did you start building out your own infrastructure?

Tanuj ChatterjeeIt was not like one golden moment where everything changed. It was a lot of things along the way. Unfortunately, there was no one silver bullet, but like I said, we looked into reviews, what's keeping us away from being the number one product. A lot of it came back to service quality for us. So, we spent a lot of time on service quality. And thankfully, that's my DNA and that's how I think, too.

Tanuj ChatterjeeWe started building a team. We started focusing on service quality. We started some basic things about ASO, localizations and whatnot, but mainly service quality. And then things started going up. In the last five years, as you know, a lot of geopolitical things also happened, where suddenly we'll get a massive spike. So as we were starting to go up, we will see a massive spike from country A versus country B.