Celebrating 7 years of Koofr
It is Koofr's birthday week and we wanted to commemorate it with a very special blog post. We want to tell you more about our values and what we hold dear as a company. We want to talk about the changes we made on our journey from the idea to the product that is in front of you today. And of course, also about what still lies ahead of us.
Written by human for humans
A bit of history
The idea for Koofr came to life eight years ago in 2012, when the first draft of the first-ever product was made. Seven years ago, in February 2013, the enthusiastic Koofr team of then five people officially launched its product and introduced Koofr to the booming start-up world. Its services unique in its home country and the country of its headquarters – Slovenia, it was soon firmly on the map.
And things just got more interesting from there.
In 2014 Koofr experienced a complete rethink and the team launched a completely new product, finalized with a new graphic identity. At that point, Koofr started growing into the product you know today.
What does Koofr stand for now?
Our core business is developing advanced, secure storage solutions for large enterprises and ISPs. Meaning, we handle and safely store large amounts of data for large companies, so our core expertise is actually how not to lose stuff. When we decided to expand our offer beyond large enterprises and offer our own public cloud storage, under the Koofr brand, we did it with this in mind.
Why did we decide to do it even though there were huge players, like Dropbox and Google already around? Because we believe we can offer a more private experience and we saw some niches on the market that were not being served by the big guys.
Like any idea that grows with time, we outgrew, changed and transformed some things in our business practices and processes in the past seven years. We decided to offer the best possible product while collecting the least amount of data possible from our users, putting privacy to the very top of our values. We do not need to track our users' clicks and in-app activities like our competitors do, to be able to improve our services. We do that by collecting our users' feedback through various different channels.
Koofr is, in fact, the only cloud storage provider that doesn't track its users. The only cookie we use is the session cookie, which makes sure you are logged in to our application. So when General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into effect in 2018, our team and our processes were not only ready for it but already ahead of it.
In the time that privacy is becoming a luxury, our goal is to hold as little personal data about our users as possible while being able to provide our service to you. That is why we do not use any third-party tracking tools on our websites or in our services. We do not put any Cookies in your browser, with the exception of the one that keeps you logged into our application.
And while the core Koofr team hasn’t changed much since the start, in terms of ideas we are constantly growing and changing. Seven years might not seem much, but surviving seven years, while being profitable along the way still isn't very common in today’s business world.
In contrast to many tech companies nowadays, we decided to go for profitability and self-sustainability instead of the VC money, which is a much tougher road. But now, seven years later, we are not bound to any VC metrics and targets, giving us the freedom to make our own decisions, and more importantly, our roadmap and development are based on people that make our journey possible, our customers.
And what lies ahead?
While we look to the future, we, of course, look to the new features that are coming, to continuous growth, to offering exceptional customer service and the best user experience possible. We want to grow steadily while making sure we remain profitable along the way.
You will not see huge advertising spends from us, or giving away millions of TB for free, because the only ones standing behind us with the wallet open are our users. We will probably never have all the features that others have, nor do we think all those features are good.
All of our features and ideas for ones are first weighed against our privacy beliefs and against how they intrude into our user’s privacy. Privacy of your data and information is at the very core of our values and services. This is the fundamental base that we have been building on for all these years. We believe users have the right to a product that offers great functionality but with their privacy respected at the same time.
We are always listening to the feedback from users and we have some awesome features coming in the future. And while we celebrate the 7th anniversary of Koofr we proudly look back to the progress we made, but mostly, we look ahead at what we still want to achieve.
Thank you for using Koofr, we hope we can keep surprising you with our ideas, new features and our customer service in the years to come.
Your Koofr Team
Join us on the Koofr subreddit and become a part of the growing Koofr community!