A Text Input, Some Encryption, and a Submit Button
In 2011, I built something that took about a weekend.
A text input. Some encryption. A submit button. That was it. I pushed it to production, open-sourced the code, and went back to my day job. I didn’t think about it much after that.
But someone used it. And then someone else did. And then a few more.
“Go Ahead. Email Another Password.” That was the tagline. That was the whole pitch. The product was barely a product — it was a reaction to a problem that annoyed me. People were emailing passwords in plain text. So I built the smallest thing that could fix that.
Then a strange thing started happening.
See that flat line from 2012 to 2014? That’s three years of almost nothing. Then a slow curve upward. Not fast. Not in any way that would make a headline. Just — every month, a little more. More Docker pulls. More people I’d never heard of, at companies I’d never heard of, quietly using this thing I built on a weekend.
Year after year. I’d add a feature. Fix a bug. Add another feature. The backlog grew. Feature requests started waiting six months. Then a year. Then longer.
And at some point — I don’t remember the exact moment — I had to make a decision.
Option one: keep the pace. Hobby project. A few features a year. Nothing wrong with that.
Option two: find a way to make this thing self-sufficient. Work on it properly. But on my terms.
I went with option two.
Now here’s the part where most founders say they raised a round. Pitched VCs. Built a deck. Got a term sheet.
I didn’t do any of that.
Instead, I built a feature pipeline. Premium features for subscribers, with those features rolling into the open-source version over time. Customers fund development. Development benefits everyone. No investors, no debt, no one to answer to except the people using the product.
That became Apnotic.
And today — fourteen years after that weekend — we have 345K monthly active users. 50M+ Docker downloads. Over 100 million secrets shared. 400 paying customers. Healthy recurring revenue. A team of two, an advisor, and fourteen years of work that I genuinely enjoy showing up to every day.
All from a text input. Some encryption. And a submit button.