TrackOFF
A short story about building a successful product from the ground up and seeing it through to acquisition.
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 number two, 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.
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.
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 man with whom I proceeded to work closely for the next 5 years.
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
TrackOFF was the company's flagship product and the one that gave the business its name. It was a desktop-first privacy app designed to make online tracking far less reliable by obfuscating the digital signals websites and ad platforms used to profile people.
Core value
Reduced the accuracy of third-party profiling and cross-site tracking, giving users more privacy and a stronger sense of control over their browsing.
Platforms
Microsoft Windows, with millions of copies sold across distribution channels, later expanding to macOS, Android, and iOS.
What it did
In simple terms, the product scrambled the identifying data a tracker could collect from a device. That made it much harder for data brokers and advertisers to confidently decide whether the user on one website was the same person they had seen elsewhere.
Why it mattered
By 2023, similar protections had become common in privacy-focused software and even mainstream browsers. Back in 2015, though, this was a genuinely forward-looking proposition that landed well as privacy awareness started to grow.
My role in it
When I joined, the interface lacked clarity, polish, and the kind of trust cues a privacy product needed. My job was to turn it into a product experience that felt understandable, credible, and usable across desktop first and later mobile surfaces.
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
To support reseller growth, I designed an internal portal that turned a clunky database-like workflow into a usable partner-facing tool for managing activation keys, renewals, and white-label product setups.
Who it served
Our reseller partners sold the product through their own channels, either under the TrackOFF brand or as white-label offers with their own logo and color scheme. I designed both the portal experience and the white-label UI variations that supported that model.
What I designed
The dashboard surfaced activation key status, expiration, renewals, and related details in a format that people could actually work with. It also supported bulk key generation, often at very large volumes, and included search tools for locating and managing groups of keys by category.
Outcome
A raw operational workflow became a much clearer partner product.
That made the reseller model more attractive commercially and earned extremely positive feedback from existing partners about the improved process.
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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