Relaunching Leak.
It feels so good to just say it.
Built in 48hours, product-hunted, hugely covered by media and twitter spheres, admittedly criticized by some, but most of all largely praised by the public, and finally suspended by third parties within 10 days. This is, in short, the bittersweet inception of Leak.
Today, Laurent and I are very excited to announce that Leak is back online. And, hopefully, for good.
Here are the reasons why we had no other options than making all we can to relaunch Leak.
In the idea we trust.
We believe in the idea behind Leak. A deadly simple idea actually.
Giving the ability to everyone to say something he doesn’t dare to say.
This is a situation that everyone has experienced: a thought that we keep for ourselves because it is too hard to say, because we are ashamed or because it would put us in an uncomfortable situation. Whether it is sentimental related, a touchy truth or simply a joke, it feels so good to just say it — and that’s why Leak is so addictive. Being honest… for good.
“For good.” Yes, it’s the limit that everyone who uses Leak should definitely not cross. This is the vision we had for Leak from the beginning, conveyed by both the way we marketed Leak and our Do’s and Don’ts guidelines… and we are decided to make all our possible to defend it.
A huge and unexpected buzz.
Laurent and I have built services in the past, and we know how difficult it is to be successful.
When we launched on Product Hunt on July 28th, we became the #1 Anonymous App with 260+ upvotes & 50+ comments. We were directly mentionned in publications by Techcrunch, Washington Post, Huffington Post, Vox, The Next Web, Fast Company, Cosmopolitan, Business Insider, Daily Dot, The Telegraph, Vice, Fox, BBC, etc… and many many more in other countries (Russia, Australia, France, UK, Brasil, China, etc.). And that’s not even mentionning the Twitter buzz.
We even had our “bad buzz”! Inspired by some of the best leaks exchanged so far, we decided to send them to some journalists because we had the feeling that it was a funnier way of assisting the discovery of our product than sending a regular (and boring) press release. Actually, this action was, in a sense, clumsy on our part. Some reacted very negatively, which generated other publications, which were much more critical this time.
All in all, this was largely improvised and totally unexpected and we’re thankful to the press, Jimmy Fallon (!) and everyone that helped us spread Leak.
Figures don’t lie.
Here are a few screenshots from the deck we quickly made as VCs were reaching us:
You guys, claimed very loud the comeback of Leak!
Laurent and I were amazed by the numerous testimonies of sympathy and support we received (and still receiving each day). Some of you offered their disinterested help. Also, you guys sent to us some leaks or direct emails at team@ that were very very funny and sometimes even touching. It’s impossible to publish all of them, but I just wanted to give 2 representative examples.
This guy below reached us 10 days AFTER we suspended the service. It actually represents what we’re working for. The true meaning of Leak.
Thank you all!
We want to meet the challenge.
No bullshit — Let’s speak about the reasons why we were offline so long.
In this post I explained why we were forced by our email sending providers (Mandrill, SendGrid) to suspend Leak. Our first thought was to say: “all right, let’s build our own emails server then!”
But we hadn’t anticipated that it would be such a difficult task. I’m not talking about building the machine itself. We did it very quickly in no more than two days. The real difficulty is elsewhere and tied to Leak very special situation:
We’re not spammers: we don’t send unsollicited commercials nor do we try to swindle people into buying crap. Neither do we send bulk emails. We send emails that are exactly the same email you would send to someone you know from your regular email address: email from one person to another person with personal content, except of course the sender address is anonymous.
So what’s the problem?
It’s all about IP reputation of our server. We send emails in volume and we don’t control the content. In 99.5% of cases, it’s okay because leaks sent are fun and follow our Do’s and Don’ts. But the 0.5% of the leaks that don’t follow our guidelines both break the philosophy of Leak and harm the IP reputation of our server because recipients will complain or declare that the leak received is a spam. As a result, our server gets black-listed and no one can send leaks anymore.
We contacted very experienced email experts all over the world and realized that there were as many opinions as there were specialists.
We believe that it is possible.
But we have to handle people that will abuse the service: haters, harassers, bullies, malice informers, etc. Since it all started, we want people to use anonymity for good: Leak isn’t a dark or underground website where people can bully, threaten, harass or do any other illegal purposes.
Let’s be clear: we want to protect the freedom of speech on Leak, this is in the DNA of the service, but if you try to use Leak for any illegal purposes, we won’t cover you and we will give your IP address if requested by official authorities.
To be back online as soon as possible, we were obliged to still rely on a third party infrastructure provider that, hopefully, will support Leak as long as we need. But in parallel, we’re currently working on our own server with several back-end features that will help prevent vindictive people to use our service. We’re still a bootstrap project, so it takes a little bit more time. It is a continuous work that never stops. Any additional help is always welcome, just drop us an email.
Last but not least: we’ve got a vision.
We believe that Leak has a great potential. But this article is already long enough. Follow us on twitter and you’ll be noticed when we write about the vision that make us wake up every morning.
Happy leaking, guys 😀
- If you enjoyed this article, we’d love for you to share it on Twitter or everywhere else.
- If you would like to contribute to the project by bringing ideas / talents, send us an emai at team@.
- Thanks to Matt Perry and Dunja Lazic for providing feedbacks on this post.
