This is our introduction and also the story of how as 3 long time friends we have launched WireVPN, a globally available WireGuard VPN service.
We all know how draining a 9 to 5 desk job can be. The repetitiveness of the business days, the obligation of meeting time standards that kill your creativity, the feeling of losing the most important time of the day just to be tired enough to not want to do anything after work hours... We all felt these feelings one way or the other and our story also starts from here. 2 engineers and 1 business developer by trade, we have been working on 9 to 5 jobs for almost 8 years until we decided to go on a journey.
As 3 friends who know each other since primary school, we always talked about starting up a company together but it was never serious enough to follow through. We were all working in very good jobs with great financial security and potential future in successfull careers. Although we were fully focused and motivated to do our jobs, we always had the calling of trying new things while also dreaming about being more free in work life. We are very interested in technology, we read a lot and we coded applications and small games as a hobby in our free times.
One of the areas we were interested as a hobby was VPN. We were living in Istanbul and it should be no surprise that VPNs are part of daily life due to heavy sensoring of Internet. For years we have alternated between famed global services with varying levels of satisfaction but we in the end decided to make our own private VPN server for daily use as it would give use the control to fix any complaints we had while using. This was around 4 years ago and we, as 3 friends were the only users of this private VPN. In the next couple of years, slowly and slowly our other friends and family also started to use our server as it would come up during conversations or we would just offer them to try it out if they complained about their VPN services. By the end of 2017 almost 200 people were using our VPN server, all of whom were our friends, friends of friends or family members. We did not even notice but we were giving service to 200 very active users, listening to their complaints, fixing or improving our backend and just getting better at supplying a service without even thinking about it professionally.
Since the first verison of our server, we have switched between protocols and client softwares many times to find out which ones were the best. At the start of 2019, we found out about WireGuard protocol. It was ambitious, simple, fast, secure and overall an intriguing project. We switched our server to WireGuard at that time and since the first moment we started using it we were in love. The overall feeling of the connection and speed, the way that the connection never drops when you switch from your wifi to your router felt great. After our switch we started receiving a lot of positive feedback from the people around us about the improved feeling but they were also frustrated because the first setup was really hard. Everyone used different phones, operating systems, computers and as we were the only people they ask for help, we were flooded with whatsapp messages from friends, family and even from people we do not know how they started using our server. It was at this moment we noticed that this great protocol had a massive potential and still lacked a WireGuard service with end-user oriented, easy to use clients.
We were already in search for a change in our work life due to the feelings I described. It did not take us too long to switch from just thinking about opening up a commerical service to fully focusing on it. We were already experienced with all aspects of the service and we knew our strengths and weaknesses. We planned out all the development we need to do for supplying this service on a large scale and immediatly started working on it. And now, by the end of first half of 2019 we are all self-employed with a new company in Estonia focusing on delivering the first easy to use, client oriented WireGuard VPN service. We are globally available on all platforms with native clients on Android and MacOS. Our development is continuing full speed to deliver native clients for iOS and Windows in just a couple of weeks. We have an increasing user traction all around the world and more than 10000 current active users and we are focused on improving ourselves with all the feedback we get from our users as well as our vision of an anonymity and client oriented VPN service.
To achieve this in such a small amount of time, in a field we are passionate about is incredibly humbling and we are extremely happy that we took the leap of faith. We wish good luck and courage to all of you who dream like us to go for the leap!