They either do that, or sell your data to other parties. But that’s why Rick Peters, Peter Skinner, and Brian Jacobs founded Ekko – they want it to be unlike most mainstream apps that deal with data. At its base Ekko is a central hub for messaging and content. That is, it provides a strong UX for people who want all of their messaging platforms in one, easy to use solution. The team went way beyond that though and decided to couple those features with the best possible data security they could provide. Together, the three cofounders believe that internet services can be innovative, feature rich, and powerful without compromising individual data, privacy, and security. I sat down with Rick Peters to talk more about this philosophy and how they’ve built Ekko to embody it.
Where did you get the initial idea for Ekko?
Specifically, what are you protecting?
What’s your model and how do your users feel about it?
We couldn’t find that in any other products on the market, so we decided to put it together ourselves. We built a hub for messaging that encompasses all your message types and built in the ability to send secure messages on top of it. We thought it would be easy, but as we found out it wasn’t. The biggest challenge was the integration aspect. We needed to hook up to Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, etc. Not to mention we have to deal with third party issues and the changing landscape about who will choose to share what and allow us to do what we want with it. So far they’re enjoying it even though we’ve been taking our time growing. Currently, we have a few thousand users, and I’d say 98 percent of them are paying. Every six to eight weeks we try to iterate a new release and learn from peoples’ feedback. They’re great at telling us what they like and don’t. You can sit in a vacuum but until you get out into the real world you don’t know anything. Image Credit: Pixabay
