HMA was a triumph of marketing and usability over security concerns. They are one of the most law-friendly VPN providers out there (and it couldn't be otherwise, considering they hail from a certain GCHQ-ruled island), but they were great at selling a simple way to avoid boring office-network blocks. I remember using their web proxy to bypass some stupid block on the FreakAngels webcomic (to this day, I still can't understand why anyone would block such innocuous material).
The key was also simplicity. Other proxies had popups and redirects everywhere, audio banners, couldn't be trusted to not give you a virus. HMA just worked. It's the same reason Imgur made a killing.
And sadly I get redirected to some sinoadv scam sometimes when I visit imgur on my phone or tablet (adblocked them on my PC until they fix this). I'm sure they're much more careful when selling ad space in the US, but they're doing a horrible job outside the US.
Many filters aren't that sophisticated, it might just have been a single word that tripped it up. I remember "hackaday" being blocked at my High School because it was tagged as a "hacking website" by the filter.
I had exactly the same problem with a site I made for a friend's wedding. It included a short message from the bride and groom ending with 'xxx' — i.e. kiss kiss kiss. Vodafone UK (at least) blocked it as porn.
The funny thing is that if you visit a blocked website over HTTPS, it will often work, because the web filter won't be able to scan the contents. I used that trick many, many times to get around Websense.
Seems to be a well-deserved example of doing something unoriginal, boring and well-trodden in a no-bullshit, user- friendly way and being rewarded for it.
I think Whatsapp is another great example - afaict the key innovations there were using cell phone numbers as user IDs and running on every platform known to man. Just works. Dropbox and Imgur are two others.
The list of successful companies which put the 'first mover advantage' myth to the sword is very long and illustrious.
The saying should be 'first decent mover'. There's a world of difference. Often it's the one that comes along and takes the basic concept and executes it in a way that makes sense to a larger user base is the one that wins. Too often the first versions of a product are still cloaked in the terms and features of the technology that underpins it.
Unoriginal? When I started using HMA a couple of years ago, there were practically no real competitors!
They had the highest number of VPN nodes all over the world, a dozen of IPs per country compared to 1-2 for other services.
The app was also easy to use and worked without problems, had no disconnects AND disabled your internet connection IF you did get disconnected for whatever reason, not exposing your real IP.
That may have been lip service though, because even their ToS stated "we'll turn your info over to the authorities at the first request, no offense" :-) but technically, it worked well..
Microsoft added the "briefcase folder" in Windows 98 (maybe even a '95 update). It was crappy and clunky, but the concept was basically the same. When storage prices started to fall, online lockers and backup solutions were a dime a dozen, they were just painful to use and they would kill your bandwidth. DB was successful because it was easy, nonintrusive, fairly robust and came after bandwidth stopped being a real problem for most people, but particularly original it was not.
I don't know what's the fuss about Dropbox being called boring. It's a backup service, so it's not really an insult, it's just not supposed to be exciting, or fun. It's supposed to work. It wasn't original either, but it worked seamlessly and reliably to the point where you confidently forgot about it. Would you trade that for some backup that didn't work so well, but was, yeay, more exciting? (I don't even know how you add excitement to backups... do you make it a video game? Add videos?)
Dropbox was gamified, a bit, in my view, in that I had loads of people who'd invite me to dropbox, because they'd get extra storage for getting me to sign up. Maybe it's not real gasification because they didn't get badges?
It was an original, exciting, and ground breaking product in a market that had plenty of unoriginal, boring players.
See also MP3 Players and smartphones. Both markets looked boring and well-trodden until Apple blew fresh air into them.
The key to this kind of success is finding a segment that is currently niche but won't be for ever. Cloud storage, mobile internet messaging, portable MP3s, portable Internet -- all potential mass markets that were kept niche because the products in the market didn't have mass appeal.
The killer part of Dropbox was multi-platform, and integrating it into the OS properly, so that you knew where your stuff was. Also the downloaded app just used a simple set of credentials to get working.
I had tried many solutions before this, and they were all, without exception, a pain to use and usually ridden with ads and weird interfaces. You usually felt dirty going to download a file from the website.
I wanted to replace it with free software, but it's still a PITA --syncthing seems the best so far, although it requires more experience to be a DB killer
Old enough to remember pre-google, young whippersnapper! When the idea went round in 2000 that pagerank wasn't the key to google's success, I checked: there was a difference, but not enough to really matter, in the searches I tried.
Why would people use google? It was cool and new, had a great story... and made all tradeoffs in favour of letting you get on with searching, without a whole lot of portal BS/spam, fitting OP's criterion.
Google's biggest advantage today is speed - esp google suggest is unbelievably fast. It required a huge investment and knowhow that its less profitable competitors just can't match.
But the "some" was one of my PhD supervisors, who didn't mind a bit of thought-provoking... unlike today's HN, sad to see.
It certainly did in most cases, but it was hard to separate out the algorithm from the interface.
Even if the algorithm wasn't all that good to start with, it was damn fast, and clean, and no ads, so... you didn't mind refining a search a few times, because there were no annoying ads to slow things down.
I had one of those in school, as I'm sure many here did. I just gave my friends access to it for free. What an idiot.
(I remember someone I knew in another school tried to sell logins for his proxy to people for £5 each or something. They hated him for this perceived pettiness and he became even more of a social outcast than before. Pricing psychology is a funny thing.)
So many life lessons learned in the school IT suite!
The article mentions that HMA makes/made money via affiliate programs, but also that there were no intrusive ads or popups. Does that mean it would hijack users' normal shopping activity when signed on to HMA by injecting their own affiliate codes to make commissions? I think that kind of behavior would violate most of those commission programs' terms of use.
I read it to mean they ran their own affiliate program where affiliates could run links to sign up for HMA services, with commission payouts when traffic converts through those links (signs up for a paid HMA account). Nothing affecting the VPN traffic itself.
"Within a month HMA had hundreds of thousands of users around the world, and revenues of £15,000 per annum."
Which means that he would have been losing money like crazy on bandwidth, and yet the article says he had no investors. Obviously the business survived and was successful, but I have an extreme dislike for articles that leave out or misrepresent crucial details either for the sake of simplicity or out of sheer ignorance.
I used HMA ~2 years ago. The speeds were throttled, it's entirely possible they saved a lot of money that way. Also, xxx,xxx of users and 15,000/annum? The service was $10/month back then, I'd imagine the number should be way higher for hundreds of thousands of users...
Completely depends on your location/school/work place etc. In Canada, many people use VPNs to access American Netflix, so here, the companies that specialize in that are doing very well. I think the average cost is likely about $5 per month, almost the same cost as Netflix itself.
You have to remember, this guy's story started 10 years ago. Many schools just contract this sort of thing to a 3rd party. My school used Websense, you could easily bypass their solution by using https or simply having google translate the site from english to english.
Additionally, you also assume that there is a formal IT staff. An old roommate I had used to be in charge of selecting the hardware for the computerlab in his small town school. He was a student, his school was too small to have a real IT staff.
I think schools find it difficult to compete with tech companies because they can't afford to pay the salaries. So the people they DO get tend not to, er, be very good...
I remember at my school the IT teacher had no IT qualifications, she just happened to know more about those computer-y things than the other staff.
If your staff have to access a school district VPN and you want to block random VPNs that happen to use your same protocol, yet not have the overhead of managing which MAC addresses can use VPN services...
It just becomes a headache. Just block it nominally to avoid liability but let those kids who bother alone.
How did a 16 year old know how to write something like this? Very, very unusual. It certainly takes some know-how to put together an effective and highly usable VPN service.
