Move over data collection. Massive is building the future of monetization for developers.

Xoogler.co Founder Series: Brian Kennish

Today, the primary form of monetization for developers is to run ads targeted with data collected from users. But the growing controversy around data privacy calls for a new solution. Massive is creating the solution through a software development kit that allows developers to monetize using idle user computing power rather than data collection.

Brian Kennish co-founded Massive with the goal of finding an alternative to data collection monetization. We sat down with Brian to learn about the inspiration behind building Massive, his experience, and what’s next. All quotes are from Brian.

They recently raised an $11M round and have a team of three Xooglers. They are currently hiring for a PM, a salesperson, and engineers! They are also looking to meet and partner with upcoming decentralized projects. If you’re a Xoogler and interested, reach out!

Bringing together experiences at Google and as an independent app developer

Brian’s journey to building Massive began at Google where he worked as a software engineer on Google’s first public APIs. On these teams, he was in charge of developer relations, which is where he became familiar with developer customers. Following seven years at Google, Brian became an app developer building over 30 desktop mobile, and browser apps– 7 of which have over 1M users. One of these is Disconnect, a browser extension with over 10M users designed to stop third-party trackers. But with an app centered around limiting user data collection, he struggled to find a business model that did not revolve around data collection from his users. This is where he realized there needed to be a new solution.

“We started Massive to give developers and their users the option of making money and paying online with spare computing resources rather than personal attention and data. The users who opt in form a distributed supercomputer that we hope has more and more new decentralized projects to host. Our goal in providing an alternative to both centralized data collection and computing infrastructure is to help make sure the future of computing is controlled by everyone not a few megacorporations.”

A Massive solution

Massive provides the solution by allowing developers to monetize their apps through access to idle user computer processing power, storage, and bandwidth.

From a user perspective, users forgo personal information and behavioral data collection and allow developers to use computer power when the user does not want it.

From a developer perspective, developers gain the ability to monetize without heavy data collection, which is increasingly vital as data privacy laws become tighter and consumer attitudes toward data collection become more repulsive.

Gaining traction from developers

Ultimately, Massive is creating a two-sided marketplace with idle user computing resources on one side, and companies/projects with a large computing workload on the other. Today, Massive’s greatest use case is using idle computing power for hosting blockchain infrastructure. The demand here is already high, so now it’s up to Massive to gain new developers.

“One of our biggest challenges has been that Massive is a business-to-developer product, which is less common than B2C or B2B products and has a longer time to market because the performance threshold for getting a developer to put your code in their app is high. Your growth can be exponential if you reach the threshold, though, and we’ve quickly passed 100,000 daily active users.”

What’s next

Massive recently raised an $11M round and is looking to hire across product management, sales, and engineering. See their open jobs here. They are also looking to collaborate with Xooglers working on exciting early-stage distributed computing, storage, or bandwidth projects. If you’re working on an early-stage project, reach out here.

Xoogler.co Founder Stories Series

Xoogler.co Founder Stories features various Xoogler founders and highlights their journey, share their learning experiences along the way, and showcase the exciting ideas each founder pursued after leaving Google. Be sure to follow us for upcoming Founder Stories!