100DoTS Week 3 - 10k, thoughs and direction

Hi everyone!

Not much has happened on Chiffre last week, I've been busy on other projects, I took some time off to arrange my thoughts and take advantage of the partial lockdown lift in France to get some fresh air.

Stats

We have passed the 10k mark! 🎉 It's my friend Romain Clement that passed the line with his website on the evening before my birthday, it was a nice early gift 😁

Project direction

The feedback from the landing page got me thinking that I might be going in the wrong direction: while end-to-end encryption does add value for privacy, doing so in the context of website analytics is too restrictive: it becomes hard to add value on top of the local decrypted data.

I initially had some doubts about the scalability of the system (if you get lots of page views, the data to download, decrypt, store and analyse becomes exhaustively high), but the poll I ran on Twitter got some interesting results (although the sample size was very restricted): most responses were under the 100 daily visits (probably personal sites and blogs, which was the initial target for Chiffre).

Chiffre was never only about analytics in my mind, I used that domain to test the technology of a many-to-one end-to-end encryption service, but the applications are diverse: if you need to collect data from many sources into a central place, and make sure nobody else but you can see (or process) this data, then Chiffre might be a suitable solution.

If you have data protection issues, like using a service but not trusting what they do with your sensitive data, let me know, I'll be glad to discuss with you.

I'm going to put the marketing side of this challenge on hold for at least a week, to enjoy the last days of spring, reflect on the experience and think about where to go for the future of the platform.

The analytics application itself is not going anywhere yet though, I'm still using it for my own websites, and I've just enabled Next.js metrics for it on my website using custom events, here's the code if that's your thing:

export function reportWebVitals(metric) {
  window.chiffre?.sendNumber({
    name: metric.name,
    value: metric.value,
    meta: {
      path: window.location.pathname
    }
  })
}

If you want a preview account, you can still signup here (I'm keeping the link up):

https://chiffre.io/signup?code=100DoTSWeek2

See you soon, and take care.

François Best
Founder | Chiffre.io