Try Again

“WeTransfer is one of the most underrated stories in startups.” - Harry Stebbings

It sure is one hell of a story. Mostly because there isn’t one story, but several. Told by various people holding different truths due to a mix of incentives. It’s like WeCrashed mixed with The Wire and a little bit of The Bold and the fucking Beautiful. One thing that is clear is that the product “a simple file-sharing website” has been successful in growing organically since it went live in 2009.

The service wasn’t asking much from people and offered a simple solution to a big enough problem. It’s the straightforward reality of making software people want and can use.

From the start, we instilled fundamental beliefs around the user experience. It was always about giving people something, instead of taking. Instead of asking people to sign up for something they hadn’t used before, we made it possible to upload and share files without creating an account.

Instead of annoying banner ads, we took wallpaper advertising from my blog and brought it to the masses. Including the idea of giving artists a platform where they could promote their work and inspire commercial advertisers to make better ads.

There was this naive idea that if people liked using WeTransfer, people would stick around. And maybe pay for extra features if they really wanted to. This is how we bootstrapped the company to profitability before we raised any funding.

WeTransfer became the world’s biggest tech B Corp, while giving away 30% of the advertising inventory to support the arts and 1% of all revenue went to a foundation.

But none of that really matters if you change your terms of service to screw over your users.

Anyway, in 2019 I was done. I sold my shares. Others took over and later sold out to private equity after failing to IPO. It is what it is. I moved on and WeTransfer continued to be of service to millions of people all over the world.

But this week something changed.

TOS updates, the outcry from creatives, media chasing headlines. People felt fucked.

In short, the new terms would grant WeTransfer permission to train artificial intelligence on any content transferred by users and produce derivative works based on the transferred content that the file-sharing company would be allowed to monetize without having to pay users for.

WTF?

Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.

Goodwill and brand value can’t be measured. They’re not visible in Excel sheets. Numbers follow vision. These events got me thinking...

What if I started over and built a file-sharing service again? Take all lessons learned and use this for something wonderful. A service that champions creativity, not steal it.

So… here we go: https://www.boomerang.zip 🪃

Stay tuned for more.

N.