Gabriel Weinberg, 36, runs DuckDuckGo, an eight-year-old search engine based near Philadelphia that is a David to Google’s Goliath. With a staff of 40 contractors and full-timers, DuckDuckGo hosts 3 billion searches a year, compared to Google’s trillion-plus. Its primary selling point is that it offers real privacy because it does not track searches or store users’ history. Weinberg, who wrote a 2014 book, Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers, that suggests ways to market new companies, says DuckDuckGo’s 2015 revenues exceeded $1 million (Google’s were $74.5 billion). In this interview, which has been condensed and edited, he describes the multiple ventures he started and shuttered, the two that succeeded and the many lessons he learned along the way.
Susan Adams: What did you do before you started DuckDuckGo?
Gabriel Weinberg: As soon as I got out of MIT in 2000, I started an educational software company, Learnection, which was a terrible name. It was a social networking endeavor aimed at increasing parental involvement in schools. But it was way too early
Adams: How did you fund the business?
Weinberg: I finished school in three years. But I was lucky and my grandmother had left me tuition money for four years of college. I used that and I raised some friends and family money. I lost all of it, between $30,000 and $45,000.
Adams: What did you do wrong?
Weinberg: Lots of things. I hired friends because I liked them but they were the wrong kind of people to hire. I only paid them $1,000 and they left after a year. I failed to make decisions quickly. I spent a lot of time engineering a project that wasn’t useful in the market.
Adams: What did you do next?
Weinberg: I started another four to six companies of various kinds. One was a success. It was an early social networking company. The product was called NamesDatabase. It was a way to find old classmates and friends. It’s a completely anachronistic concept now, given Facebook, but this was between 2003 and 2006. I sold it to classmates.com in 2006 for $10 million.
Adams: What did you do right?
Weinberg: I focused on what I write about in my book. We had users before we even had a product.
Adams: How did you get people to sign up for a product that didn’t exist?
Weinberg: I was trying all these different side projects. One day I decided to make up pages of fake names, taking first and last names from popular names tracked by the Census. I just made pages of these names on the hunch that people would be searching for names on the Internet. Back then it took Google six months to index things. Six months later I had completely forgotten about it. Then all of a sudden this random site I put up started getting 10,000 searches a day. People were searching for other people and my site was coming up first. At the beginning I just put a link at the top and sent the person to another site that said, sign up for this product. We didn’t have a product yet but people started signing up anyway.
Adams: What lessons did you learn from that success?
Weinberg: Right after we realized we had a good idea, we focused mainly on how to continue to grow and get more users and have them refer each other. Most people do the opposite. They end up launching, they realize they still have a leaky-bucket product and they have no idea how to get customers. In the book we advocate spending half your time on traction, which means getting customers, and half the time on product development. In this company we flipped that on its head. We spent almost all our time on how to get customers and zero time on product development. Which isn’t good but you can have some success if you have customers and no product.
Adams: How did that lead to DuckDuckGo?
Weinberg: I realized that one of the reasons we didn’t spend time on the product was I wasn’t that interested in it. I’m not a big social networker. I realized I wanted to work on something I am actually excited about and could see myself working on for a decade or more. But I couldn’t figure out what that was. For the next year and a half I tried out a bunch of companies and products.
Adams: What did you try?
Weinberg: I started a Meetup.com competitor. I started a golf social network which was super bone-headed because I don’t golf. I also started a genealogy site.
Adams: How did you settle on DuckDuckGo?
Weinberg: Search is really appealing to me because you essentially have infinite space. People can type in anything and you need to return something interesting and ideally answer the question without having to click around. The Internet has exploded with all these different sources, with Wikipedia being the one people think about first. Bringing together those sites in an interesting way appealed to me and still does.
Adams: Didn’t you think it was insane to try to start a competitor to Google?
Weinberg: I started out not by trying to start a competitor. I just started trying to improve my Google results. There was removing spam. Back at that time, there were a lot of bad results. I was also adding in a bunch of instant answers. Wikipedia wasn’t coming up at the top so I added that. I thought both of those added value and if I could get the regular links to improve as well, that would be good. Then I added privacy to that. I backed into it. I didn’t think about it from a business perspective at the time. I initially put it out there to see if other people would like it.
Adams: You said Learnection was a terrible name. How did you come up with DuckDuckGo?
Weinberg: It popped into my head one day on a walk with my wife. Historically my naming has been less than stellar, and when my wife liked it (the first time in my recollection) I said I would use it for something. This was all pre-DuckDuckGo. Then when I started working on a search engine, it felt like it kind of fit and so I went with it.
Adams: How did you figure out that it could be a business?
Weinberg: I launched DuckDuckGo at the end of 2008, and in March of 2009 my first son was born and I decided to stay at home with him for at least the first two years. Through those two years I just kept at it and tinkering with it. At the end of 2010 all the iterative work on the project became better. Something clicked and people started to switch to it. Then in 2011 I started to treat it as more of a real thing, and at the end of 2011 I went and raised $3 million from Union Square Ventures.
Adams: How did you sell it to your investors?
Weinberg: The premise I had was very much an analogy to a web browser. The underlying technology had reached maturity and you could differentiate it based on other factors like design and add-ons. I felt the same thing was happening with search. The links weren’t changing that much. Yahoo and MSN search were very similar. There was room for some differentiation. That included privacy, design and instant answers.
Adams: I tried asking both Google and DuckDuckGo a simple question: Who won the Super Bowl? Google told me it was the Denver Broncos, while the top result on DuckDuckGo was a headline about who won the Super Bowl “ad smackdown.”
Weinberg: Instant answers is a hard problem. Google gives them about a third of the time and we give them about a third of the time. It’s the dream to get to 80% of the time.
Adams: What’s your big selling point now?
Weinberg: We don’t track you. When you search on DuckDuckGo, you’re completely anonymous. Since Snowden and other revelations about tracking on the Internet, people have tried us out. Ultimately we also think we’re a better search experience. We have a cleaner design and we think it’s more fun.
Adams: This may be naïve of me to ask, but what are you protecting me from?
Weinberg: Several things. Those ads that follow you around the Internet are significantly reduced. Another more pernicious think is that people are building profiles of you and targeting you. Not only do ads follow you but prices will change. As a consumer, your digital footprint is significantly reduced if you use DuckDuckGo. Also we don’t know who you are so we’re not tailoring our results to you. That means that when you’re doing political research, when you go to Google, they’ll show you links they think you want to click on. That includes very few opposing viewpoints. If you’re a Democrat, you’ll see an MSNBC article and not a Fox article.
Adams: Google has an “Incognito” option that claims not to store cookies and search history. Isn’t that just as good as DuckDuckGo?
Weinberg: Incognito is a complete myth. It doesn’t stop anyone from tracking you. It only erases stuff on your computer so someone like your spouse can’t see it. [A Google spokeswoman says that cookies and site visit activity from Incognito sessions aren't saved after the session ends.]
Adams: Even if you do some things better than Google, how can you possibly make money?
Weinberg: We make money the same way other search engines make money. When you type in “car,” you get a car ad. We syndicate Microsoft and Yahoo ads through the Microsoft Yahoo Search Alliance.
Adams: What share of the ad revenues does DuckDuckGo get?
Weinberg: That’s confidential.
Adams: All the businesses I talk to say they advertise on Google, and no one ever mentions Yahoo.
Weinberg: There are only two big ad feeds. There’s Google and then there’s Microsoft Yahoo. Microsoft Yahoo is cheaper and it gets you in front of yet more customers. A lot of the time companies go through agencies that do both and the client doesn’t even realize they’re doing it.
Adams: Your book suggests 19 different ways to get customers. How did you do it at DuckDuckGo?
Weinberg: The book says that when a company is in a growth stage, it primarily relies on one channel to drive that growth. In a sophisticated situation it might be multiple channels feeding into that channel. When one channel tops off, you reach diminishing returns and you have to switch channels. We’ve had to do that five times.
Adams: Tell me about the five channels.
Weinberg: We started out using search engine optimization. That meant people going to Google and typing in, “new search engine.” That worked well. But there weren’t that many people doing that. Then we switched to content marketing. In our case it started with a blog where we built up an audience. Then we switched to a strategy called microsites. We put out sites with information on educational privacy sites and search privacy.
Adams: How many freelancers did you hire to produce the content?
Weinberg: For the first three-and-a-half years it was all me. We only had four sites.
Adams: What came next?
Weinberg: PR. First it was online and then we focused on print and then on TV.
Adams: Did you hire a publicist?
Weinberg: Through different periods we had PR agencies working with us. But we were mostly just doing it ourselves. Initially I put up a billboard in San Francisco saying, “Google Stalks You. We Don’t.” That made a good story. We were the top story on Wired that day and USA Today covered us. It was an experiment to see if PR would work and it did. Then we focused on telling the David and Goliath story and the privacy story. Then Snowden happened and a lot of those stories turned into, what can you do about this.
Adams: What was your last strategy?
Weinberg: Business development, which for us is partnerships. We’re in about 90 different browsers, most of which you definitely haven’t heard of. But they include Safari and Mozilla Firefox.
Adams: I thought the government could track me whether I use DuckDuckGo or not.
Weinberg: No they can’t. They can get to your Google searches, but if you use DuckDuckGo it’s completely encrypted between you and us. We don’t store anything. So there’s no data to get. The government can’t subpoena us for records because we don’t have records.