TrackOFF
A short story about creating a successful product from the ground up to being acquired by a major corporation.
Company and team
TrackOFF was a consumer privacy company headquartered in Baltimore, Maryland (USA). Founded by Chandler Givens and Ryan Flach, it grew rapidly over the following four years. I joined the startup as employee #2, and helped build the company from the very beginning. By the end of 2019, our team had 30+ beautiful people on board, many of whom I still call my friends.
My role
I was responsible for a wide range of projects covering all the company's needs. This work included designing UX & UI for our website and software products on desktop and mobile, developing brand identity, creating visuals for hundreds of presentations, emails, and pitch decks, and doing print and physical design such as product packaging and in-store banners.
In hindsight, it was pretty hardcore, considering I was the only designer on the team for well over a year. Once we realized we were spreading ourselves thin, we brought Jon Schubbe on board to help with UX design, a guy with whom I proceeded to work closely for the next 5 years.
Having high responsibility, real deadlines, and a genuinely fast-paced environment while caring about every facet of the work was a perfect bootcamp that allowed me to grow and develop as a professional in record time.
Website
It all started with the TrackOFF website. Back in 2015, I was doing freelance work and took on a small project for Chandler to update the fold on the homepage. He liked both the results and how we clicked together, so I began to work on the designs for the rest of the site. We rapidly iterated and launched it within a month.
Over the next few years we designed and launched three major versions of the website, evolving the branding and style, as well as constantly optimizing information architecture, acquisition funnels, and click-through rates.
Product
Our main product was called TrackOFF, which lent its name to the parent company. It was a desktop-first app that helped people hide from online tracking by utilizing a patented digital fingerprint obfuscation technology.
Without going into too many technical details: it scrambled the data a tracker gathered from your computer, preventing the company behind it from reliably assembling your profile. Basically, they couldn't tell if it was actually you, so they couldn't sell your data to advertisers, who in turn couldn't track you across multiple websites.
By 2023, similar functionality was built into many privacy-oriented tools. Even Safari browser offered it out of the box. However, back in 2015 it was a genuine innovation ahead of its time, allowing us to capitalize on the growing demand.
When I came on board, the app's UI looked ridiculous, so I had to roll up my sleeves and make it functional, good-looking, and user-friendly.
Our main platform was Microsoft Windows, reaching millions of copies sold across all distribution channels. Over the years, we also released a version for macOS, as well as Android and iOS apps on mobile.
Marketing and promo materials
My responsibilities included creating marketing materials and presentations. We had a significant need for them, especially during our rapid growth phase. Having designed a ton of corporate newspapers and magazine layouts in the past, I saw it as one of the easier and more enjoyable parts of the job. The reason for that is probably the special feeling you have when you see a physical creation of yours, like a product box of your own design sitting on a store shelf, or a handout booklet in people's hands at a conference.
Reseller portal and white-labelled products
Another project worth mentioning is the internal tool I designed to help our reseller partners. Resellers were companies that promoted our products through their channels either under the TrackOFF brand or a white label, with their own logo and color scheme. I handled all the white-label UI designs as well.
I designed a front-end dashboard, which displayed the database of all product activation keys, indicating their statuses, expiration times, renewals, and other details, allowing resellers to generate new keys in bulk for distribution, usually tens of thousands or more. We also introduced a robust search feature, providing a way to find and manage groups of keys within a specific category. With that, we replaced what had previously been a cumbersome raw database workflow.
As a result, we started offering a much more appealing business model to our potential partners, and the existing resellers sent us extremely positive feedback about the improved quality of the overall process.
Communication and remote work
I used to work remotely long before it became commonplace during and after the pandemic. We set up Slack as our main communication tool, which had only recently started to gain popularity, and it quickly took over the emails and Skype we had relied on in the beginning. Most of the time we worked through async text-based chats, mainly due to the time zone gap between Baltimore and my location.
Acquisition by Avast Software
By the end of 2019, as we had been carving out a significant presence in the privacy software market, one of our largest partners offered to acquire the company and bring its key people on board. I was one of the specialists who were transferred under Avast's wing, allowing me to continue doing what I loved, now at a much larger scale.
The TrackOFF app evolved to become Avast and AVG AntiTrack, immediately becoming the most profitable product in Avast's entire software lineup at that time.
Personal takeaway
Working at TrackOFF was an incredibly rewarding and memorable period, during which I made a lot of friends, and had a remarkable opportunity to grow as a generalist designer. Through this holistic experience, I gradually realized that product design was the discipline where I could deliver the most value, so I focused on developing my skills in that field, making the transition to a larger company feel like a natural and purposeful next step.
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