Disclaimer: At the time of writing, I am an ex-TunnelBear employee. So please take everything I say about TunnelBear with a grain of salt. I had no part to play in the rise of TunnelBear. I joined the team after McAfee acquired the company.
What is TunnelBear?
TunnelBear is an easy-to-use, bear-themed virtual private network. The company was founded by Daniel Kaldor and Ryan Dochuk roughly a decade ago in Toronto. It bootstrapped its way to tens of millions of users before McAfee acquired it in 2018.
So what makes TunnelBear special?
Users of TunnelBear genuinely love the TunnelBear brand. As a marketer, I have never seen this level of customer adoration towards a B2C tech company. You may say that funny bear references scattered across TunnelBear’s product and marketing content might have a lot to do with why users love TunnelBear. But there’s more to the story.
TunnelBear’s success has three protagonists: product, culture, and cause. In the following sections, I’ll discuss them and highlight what TunnelBear did differently:
Product:
TunnelBear is the most user-friendly VPN in the market. Find me a VPN with a more straightforward and easy-to-use U.I., and I’ll change my name to hollow-hyper. Quirky bear animations make the product fun to use. And, yeah, we are still talking about a virtual private network here.
Before TunnelBear, VPNs were notorious for their complex U.I.s. They were built solely for a tech-savvy audience. TunnelBear redefined the look and feel of VPNs. The apps are a perfect marriage of form and function, with humour sprinkled all over the place.
Lesson: Strive to simplify things. Our brain cherishes and rewards experiences that don’t tax our cognition. A surefire way to get initial traction is to build the simplest version of any product category—such as the most easy-to-use CRM or a no-BS marketing analytics tool.
Culture:
It is hard to have a dull moment at work when everything around you, from the product to the office, is bear-themed. I wonder how much of the easy-going culture at TunnelBear was due to a conscious effort made by the founding team and how much of it was an unexpected byproduct of a light-hearted brand.
The employees are friendly. The culture was open. Leadership made all major strategic decisions in public. At any given time, the entire TunnelBear team used to be aware of all opportunities and challenges facing the company. It fostered a feeling of fellowship amongst the employees.
Here are a couple of TunnelBear traditions that speak volumes about the company culture:
All employees of TunnelBear get a unique beartar when they join the team. Here’s mine:
The ROI on the design team’s time and effort spent creating a beartar is off the charts. A beartar establishes a sense of belonging amongst new team members. A sense of belonging makes them more productive. A higher level of productivity brings in more $$ for the company.
As a TunnelBear employee, you got free coffee from a cafe near the office. There was still a self-serve in-office coffee machine. That perk nudged employees to take a break from screens and leave the office for a short stroll to the cafe. It was also a favourite meeting spot for donuts. (Donut is a slack app that randomly matches two team members every week and encourages them to connect and learn more about each other.)
Lesson: Humor deflates egos. Small but genuine gestures can make employees feel like they belong. In a company with an opaque culture, it’s tough to make statements like “we are all in this together” without sounding disingenuous.
Cause:
TunnelBear is on a mission to help users protect their privacy and bypass local censorship. Everything that the team does or creates reflects that core mission.
Take, for example, TunnnelBear’s privacy policy. It’s written in a language that mere mortals can understand. It’s the first privacy policy that I read cover to cover.
I find it funny how companies that position themselves as champions of user privacy create terms of service and privacy policies that are nothing but legalese. I’ll never understand their fetish for confusing users and getting them to agree on slimy stuff.
TunnelBear is also the only VPN I know which regularly donates thousands of free annual subscriptions to NGOs. When governments censored their citizens online, TunnelBear would increase the free plan’s data cap for users in those countries. They’ve even received a shout-out from Venezuelian president for doing so:
https://twitter.com/jguaido/status/1297935765318635520
Lesson: The passion you and your team feel for a cause is contagious. It shows up everywhere, in the product, in your marketing content, engineering projects, support messages etc. Your primary goal is to build a team where every team member can relate to your company’s cause in their own unique way.
Working at TunnelBear was inspirational. It showed me what happens when the product, culture and cause of a company are perfectly aligned.