Cookie banners is like everyone's favorite frustration. In our Slack, we have the cookie banner hall of fame. Every single website we go on where it's like, this banner is atrocious. We take a photo and we put it on there. It's like, this is not what we're trying to aim for.

Yeah. We're trying to aim for, like, as ethical as possible, as good as possible, and that would make the web a better place for everybody.

Hey, everyone. You're listening to Get Any Dev Tools. I'm joined today by Chris, who is the creator of c 15 t and the founder of consent.io. In this episode, we talk about cookie banners a lot. We go deep into cookie banners, and we talk about London and SF and whether you should be in London if you're a London start up or you should just move to SF.

This is something that is talked a lot about in London, so enjoy the episode.

When it comes to, like, designing, say, a website or an app, I feel like designing a website is like painting a picture. When designing an app like a dashboard is much more designing a map. And, like, the differences are very different. It's like one is very creative, and that's where I think agents are very bad at. As as this like purple glow you see around, it's like, oh, how do you know it's an AI?

It's like, got purple glow. But then an AI designing a dashboard, obviously, with, like, the creation of, Chateaune, like, modern day bootstrap and all these things, it makes that side so much easier because, obviously, if we think of, like, a dashboard, like a map, maps have keys. Keys are certain you know, everything's in a certain way. So I think that's, like, one of these massive differences when it comes to, like, designing, and I think that yeah. I I think that it's more of an art when it comes to, like, a marketing website, and I don't know.

I think there's still a lot to be done. Like, one of my favorite things right now is there's, like, this Instagram account that talks about, like, design trends that are not like, this is not like web tech. This is like, here are design trends about, like, acid art from my Berlin in the nineties or retro design from, like, Sweden. I'm like, like, collecting them to be like, if I'm gonna redo our website, why don't we just go over one of these that that's like nothing like linear or any of these things and Yeah. I don't know.

It's a really interesting subject where it's like we often be thinking that's like we have pioneers of, like, design where it's like lovable not lovable, linear, created obviously, like, the new website that everybody uses, and then you have, like, hundreds of inspirational designs. I think that's okay. Like, that's not a bad thing because people understand what they want, but then we start seeing these, like, crazy websites come out like post hoc and, like, completely changes how people perceive, like, websites. And yeah. I I wanna kinda, like, land in the middle when we're doing, like, a new website for us where it's like, it feels very techy, but but, actually, it it far much more talks about to the human problems of everything, especially in the space where we're where we're in is like, you know, cookie banners is like everyone's favorite frustration, and I don't know.

We we more so wanna connect with like the human side of like, some people say to me, it's like, do you care if I decline all? It's like, no. That's not a me problem. We're just providing the infrastructure for you to do that, and we should be providing that, like, as ethical, as human designed as possible. And, like, yeah, it's one of these areas where I constantly think about, like, in our Slack in our Slack, we have we call it the cookie banner hall of fame, where it's like every single website we go on where it's like, this banner is atrocious.

We take a phone, we put it on there. It's like, this is not what we're trying to aim for. Yeah. We're trying to aim for, like, as ethical as possible, as good as possible. And yeah.

It's it's a it's a really interesting area when it comes to design. Yeah. And maybe it's

a good time for you to share a little bit about what you're building.

Yeah. So I'm the creator of two things right now. The author of c 15 t and the founder of consent.io. And how we think about that is how we think about Vercel and Next. Js, a host and a framework.

So C15T is the open source developer cookie banner. So that is the cookie banner that sits on your website, so React or WordPress or whatever sits on the code. But what most people don't understand is that to be actually GDPR compliant, you need to store them consents in a database. So you need an API and you need a database. So we also provide that back end, and we create t 15 t to be completely open source.

So you can host that yourself, or you can spin it up much faster on our cloud product called consent.io. So it's kinda like a two two thing system where we want as much of the, you know, features to be open source. So we say that if something is purely a developer problem, then it's configuration. And if you want to open source it as in, it may be a long configuration, but you can do everything. But save some things much more of like a marketer's problem or a lawyer's problem, that's more like a consent.io thing.

And that was a similar thing to GitLab's was what I read was like, something's put purely like a developer problem, then it gets put into the core open source. But then if it's something that's touching a much higher level area, then that's moved to more of, the paid platform. So how we think about that is things like observability, things like generating your legal documents, so your privacy policy, your terms conditions, your cookie your cookie policies, and a few other exciting things coming down the line. But, yeah, we released it in May. Yeah.

Dude, it's gonna

blow up. March. Bet. Exactly. So much this year.

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Thanks again Work OS. Back to the episode.

So I actually started working on it in January. So how we actually came to build it was a really interesting set of events that I think is, like, key to a lot of things when it comes to building a product well. And I think it's like, way back to time. So this is my second startup. So and my last stop was called Everfund, and it was a nonprofit checkout solution.

So think Stripe Stripe Checkout but for nonprofits. And we built a lot of really interesting tech for it. It was really fast and I kind of built an early solution of c 15 t into that with like a server side rendered cookie banner because I was very like anal about it from very much even in that days where it's like, I don't want other people's tech on our checkout. So I built like obviously our own cookie banner and the currency MPs at the time, you could see how I was obstructing them away because they didn't really have good developer tooling. So I built all this tech in Everfund and then at the end of last year, we decided to to close that down.

So obviously, that's a really hard moment in time to close down a star, but you you then as a founder think, what am I gonna do? And I've always worked for myself. I've always been a founder to a saying extent ever since leaving university. I've we've grinded away for, like, an agency to a startup, to a funded startup, to then close it down, and I had the opportunity to start interviewing at Vercel. So I started interviewing and I was like, something doesn't feel right, but I can put my finger on it.

Maybe it was that I just can't be hired and if like a person who desires, like, don't wanna work for someone else. But I started thinking about, okay, this isn't feeling right. I don't think this is a them problem. I think it was a very much a meme. What am I gonna do instead?

So I started listening to podcasts, and I'd always listen to certain podcasts, like, one of my favorite ones was Rob Walling's stops with the rest of us about bootstrap bootstrapping a podcast. And even though I was running a VC backed podcast, I think all the things he says is still really relevant. And I was into an episode, I think, with Rick Grimer on who created Calendly SavvyCal.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

And he was saying that how he came up with the idea was he looked through his previous product at what he thought was problems and wrote them all down and then looked at the market and looked at what aligned. So I was like, this is really interesting. So I did the same thing. So I looked through my previous code base, and I wrote a whole list of, like, all the different areas that I thought was bad, really annoying around, like, obviously, developer tooling. And the number one thing was, like, cookie banners, like a segment esque system, the marketing scripts.

And I was like, this is this is really interesting. Like, this is a I remember being so terrible, but That was code that I wrote, like, a year ago. So I started by looking at it and went, okay. Let's check the market. Has has it been updated?

Is there now something that I'm missing? And, again, no. There was nothing in the market for, a developer first cookie banner solution. So I started working on a prototype almost instantly of this words. Being a second time founder, I decided that, okay, I wanted to prove that this was either gonna make it or or break it as fast as possible.

So I built a prototype in about two weeks, and then I put it on Twitter. And at this time, I didn't really have a lot of followers. I still don't have a lot, but it was smaller. And almost instantly, I got some reaction from some other SaaS founders. I was like, this looks really interesting.

One of them wanted me to start talking to them, and they I had started talking to them, and they wanted me to go work there and build it fully into their pro platform and product. So I was like, okay. Someone's seen value in this. They see this as like an additional add on to their product. Okay?

So so you put that down as validation. And then I spoke to my other founder friends that I made on the the journey of my first stop and said, okay. How do you feel about these areas? You know, GDPR, cookie banners, and and again, frustration. Don't know that they have to handle it, but they don't know how to do it well.

They know all the tools out there are really bad. So I was, like, building all these point these proof points as early as possible, and I think that was the most important thing to say. I built the prototype, and then I stepped back. I didn't build. I I gathered proof points.

So I had, like, interviews in, like, should this be, like, Aqua hired very early to work it in another start up, or should I go down this, like, founder path? And then one of the other areas was I was still interviewing at Vercel. So I was like, Guillermo talked a lot about cookie banners on x. I'm gonna I'm gonna ask in these interviews if they're building this internally because I was I was interviewing with, like, the observability team, and that was, like, my final interview where I was like, this is an area that I would find really interesting working on in Vercel. Are you currently building it?

And they were like, no. So I was like, okay. I know we have like green light here, here, and here. And I decided I was going to raise some capital.

If they said yes, would you I would have gone I

don't know. I I think I would have gone maybe I would have said put me in that area in Vercel, but it was an area that obviously, like, Guillermo, massive advocate against, obviously, hating cookie banners to then become one of our biggest advocates really show that it's not about hating on this the the problem, it's about the solution that is the bad part. So I I decided to raise some capital, and I started by speaking to one of my first ever investors in my previous job, and the pitch was it was so it wasn't bad, but it was honest. They they they were great fun and I literally said to them, hey, you know, I just closed down my last company. You was an investor.

You obviously saw that. You know, my whole life has fell apart. But, hey, I think there's something here. And then obviously laid out all these proof points to them. And they were like, we think so too, and we wanna give you six months of runway.

So we basically say, we want you to raise six months of runway, and then here's how it will be. At the end of them six months, if it isn't gonna work out or we we don't think it's gonna work out, we'll tell you, close down, and we'll all walk away saying, we took a bet. We saw this, like, early option, and it didn't work out. Or if it is going to work out, we'll help support the journey further with extra rounds. So I was like, okay.

So I raised some capital from them and a few other people and was like, great. By the same time, I was like, holy shit. I've just I've just started it again. I've I've became a founder again. Was I ready for this?

That's a good question. And we then high I then hired one of my previous engineers, young, scrappy, you know, hungry, kind of, you know, wanted to work at startups, but then obviously closed down my last stop. We had to make her redundant. Kaylee, she's she's now, like, co author of c 15 t. She joined me really early, and we just head down, build it out to then fully launch it in May.

C 15 t, we did a product hunt launch. I think one of the most important things to say with a product hunt launch is don't ever expect first position, second position, third position. It's not necessarily about winning it. It's about getting it out there and saying, okay. The product one is done.

What's next? And that's really the most important thing is we just didn't give up. We kept building. People started coming along. We kept refining it.

And now we're almost ending the year on, like, 52% month on month growth on NPM downloads with some crazy stories that I've I've already told about. I knew when we was outside was I said that I went to a meetup and meetup finished, and I was gonna go to a pub with some friends, and there was a few people still around. I said, hey. Why don't you come down to the pub with us? And they're like, yeah.

Yeah. We'll come down. And two of them were founders and literally, had a few drinks and then it's like the typical, hey. Can I can I add you on LinkedIn, you know, just before we go? And literally, I added them and then the next morning, I woke up with a message that was like, you're that guy?

You created c fifteen t? I I use that on my website today. I was like, holy shit. This guy is like proving it. I I remember listening to Tom Bloomfield talking about the first time he saw someone else with a Monzo card in London, and he was like, that was that kind of moment was like, well, I yeah.

I guess it really does work. It really is hitting that product market fit as early as possible. I I wouldn't say we've hit it, but we're seeing them early signs and that's been the most exciting thing. So to do all that in our first year has been incredible.

Yeah. That's really amazing. It's funny. I feel like London pubs have feel like quite a lot of interesting stuff has happened of the lack of pub trips.

Yeah. And I don't know. The culture is not the same in in America. And I'm not saying I'm never a big drinker, but I don't know. I I think there's something quintessential about UK pop culture, especially London pop culture.

It's something very different that only is in London. Like, I've never experienced it outside of London, but there's just like everyone wants to go for a coffee. But I'm just like, can we meet for a pint? You know? Even to my investors in London, I'm like, I don't want a coffee.

Can we just meet for a pint? Can we just treat each other like humans and have a laugh and, you know, have a good time? And yeah, I just feel like I don't know. I don't wanna say having a beer is a lot more humanizing than having a coffee, but I think it sets up a difference

The barriers are lower. I don't know what it is. It feels like you can be more honest just even if you're just both drinking coffee or something in the in the pub.

Or or I think it's more of the environment when coffees are like coffee shops are like, you know, very like inhuman these days, you know, they're they're like everywhere and when a pub feels more like homely, maybe maybe that's the point. It's like a pub feels like you can trust them more than a coffee shop, you know, it's a different kind of experience. Yeah. But that that's what I I think is really good about London is, yeah, the pub culture.

Apparently, homebrew was like the idea was like discussed and like like they were like, let's do this in in a pub in London.

I wouldn't be surprised. I wouldn't be surprised if like half the like London tech stuff has came from like pub chats. Especially these days where, you know, before you even leave the pub, you can have Claude working on it in the background. So, you know, it's it's it's an interesting time. How do you find London's tech community versus like San Francisco's tech community?

Yeah. I don't know. It's interesting. Obviously, like, goes without saying like SF is is a different ballpark. But I think there's a lot of good stuff in this.

So it's been cool to see like trigger dot dev and stuff doing really well from London, North Flank, you guys. Yeah. And I don't know. It's exciting. There's like I think maybe maybe one advantage might be this.

Just like kind of I mean, obviously talent is cheaper. It's like probably like less competitive to get like the best people plus maybe less noise might be in some ways helpful. And also it depends. Right? So I guess for you guys like if you're like GDPR stuff like for instance like probably, like, good to be helpful to be in Europe, like, in a way.

And, like, if you're selling to banks and you're selling to, like, big, like, European old school companies, like, it's gonna be handy there. I don't know. Like

Yeah. It's it's one of these things where I feel like the the the the mantra of like startups is, yeah, we're we're from London, but then we got an offer for Y Combinator. So now we're gonna go live in in San Francisco and and goodbye London. And I just, you know, I I see this pattern that I'm like and I forward this into myself where I go out to the bay for three weeks or four weeks. I'm like, I really love it here.

I I I wanna live here. But then I go, actually, it's like a it's like a it's like a fever dream, you know, where everyone's too much like you. And then then you come back to London and you go, normality, you know. Maybe it's the Britishness of me just being like, not everyone talking about tech here, but I just feel that, you know, if if you're you're the type of person who'd be like, we need more London startups and London tech companies to succeed. And then it's like, as a la vista, I'm off to San Francisco.

I feel like it's like you're betraying it. You're betraying what London could be. And I feel like I'm very much seeing in this boat myself where there's a lot of opportunity to to go to SF and grow the company there, but almost all of our competitors are US companies. It's like, why is a US company owning GDPR or or European technology? So it's actually a selling point to be in Europe.

So to then say, oh, but we started in London, but now we're all in SF because that's where the VCs are. That's where, obviously, like, the biggest capital is. It's I don't know. It feels like a small betrayal and it's something that I constantly feel like I'm like, actually, no. I should stay in London.

And I think we need to band together more and actually talk more in London and host more events and communities because I think there is some really strong companies in London, but we don't talk enough about, like, Eleven Labs, like, trigger dot dev just opened their their series a. And I always find it kind of funny because sometimes even though you're like a London based startup, you're actually an American company.

Yeah.

And it's like, oh, Finland's most successful startup, Lovable. It's like, well, they're not a Finnish company. They're actually an American company because that's how you have to, like, structure it for capital. But it's that thing of, like, I really love the idea of, like, London being, like, the second best place outside of San Francisco. I see a path that it could be.

And, you know, there is a lot of people that say, well, we've all seen the path, but it's never happened. But it's actually I think if you look at it, it's happening far much more now than ever before. And, like, for RUZ, it feels that very much that that fine line between geolocation is important and being close to, obviously, regulations and tech that's happening around here. But, also, I feel like the the talent and it's just such a different market, but as exciting I think as SF, but which one is better? I think everyone in SF will say, oh, obviously SF, but I think you can strike that middle ground.

Yeah. And, you know, you can still spend a lot of time in SF. And I don't know. Yeah. Hopefully, we can make I think a lot of people from SF wanna visit London, wanna come do some stuff do stuff here and stuff.

And maybe we can we can also like get that get that ecosystem going so that people actually wanna come here and then it's like get that kind of like roundabout. And then, you know, we can build when people come over here like we can show them around, make sure they have a great time, and then like, I don't know. Then there's more of a bond as well, like, I don't know.

Exactly. I think something I have seen as well that's really interesting and especially for founders that know this for founders as well is that when I raised our previous company, so this was 2021, '22, a lot of UK investors were still very much under The UK mindset of, like, do you have EIS or SEIS? Are you a UK company? We we can't work with you for, like, you're a US company. But, like, what I've seen, like, recently, so in the last, like, two years, I've seen a lot more UK based investors that are using US fundamentals and, like, valuations because obviously that's a classical thing.

US valuations are higher. So if you're a UK company US company, but then you're raising from Europe, you need to find the investors that are like these that still work under the American mindset but are in The UK. And I've seen a re I've seen that actually raise in the last two years where, you know, the likelihood of a UK investor saying, oh, the evaluation is too high has, like, dropped quite a lot. But I'm still seeing that with European investors. So, like, Germany, Austria, quite a few of them are like, this valuation is too high for Europe.

Not for America, for Europe. So London is becoming that place where yeah. That bridge where US capital and US vehicles are infiltrating. And I think that's the really exciting point is is that to say, okay. We have to use US vehicles.

How can we do that with keeping the same, like, valuations and and staff members and and raises? And again, talent goes so much further over here than in places like yourself. So, yeah, for one, I'm a I'm a big believer in London.

Yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Me too. The other thing I wanted to ask you about is just like dig in a little bit more to like, if you're launching an open source project like making it good.

Was it just like very much you had the exact vision? Like were there things that you did to kind of like make it something that people actually really wanna use? Like, how did you?

Yeah. I think that's really important. You know, the classic y c thing is make something people want. And as a founder, you can laugh so much when it's like, of course, I'm making something people want. I'm I want this.

Yeah.

And then and then you spend so much time working on things that don't actually matter. And I would say that, you know, I'm very lucky. So I either have really great insight to technology right now or very good luck to to find something, you know, to start a second company, zero pivots, exactly the the vision I I saw at the start of the year. It's like the road map that still is today. And really the only time I had thoughts about pivoting that road map was investment conversations where you're like, actually, this feels like I'm trying to please the investor to get money, not actually what people want or need.

And I think that's the thing where you I came back. It was like, actually, no. This is it. I knew what I was doing. I think the key to that was fixing them frustrations myself as in, like, even though we're now a company that is designing cookie banners and and and legal tech, you know, all of that is stored to please myself first, you know.

I don't want to have to maintain the terms conditions, but I need to maintain the terms conditions. So it's using all that tech first myself, and, you know, that's the classic thing of dogfooding. And I think that was a massive problem in my first startup was we had some really talented people working with us, but because they didn't use a product every day, they found it really hard to program on it or see how to pull the next big thing out of it. And I think that is a really important thing where, obviously, as now with consent, because we're all using the product every day or we're using other people's, you know, almost every website we go on has a cookie banner. You start seeing these patterns on how to make it better, and I think that is the key thing where the the dogfooding of it is super important.

And, again, it's like we're we're generating legal documents. Again, I don't wanna be writing legal documents or or going to lawyers to do it. I wanna give a document to a lawyer and say, is this good enough? And they go, yeah. And and that's the key thing.

So, yeah, tackling your your your frustrations first, I think is key, and I think that a lot of it is good. A lot of it is, you know, I know this is a problem. I've then confirmed it with people like minded that this is a problem. But I think the key to that as well is saying, would you use this? Yes or no?

Yes? No? Yes. And if they say yes, then you still like, that is not, like, done. You have to say, would you buy this?

You know, if I would would sell this to you, would you buy it? I think that's a really hard problem with developer tooling is this paying for it. And where we see the bottoms up developer approach fail is giving it away for free and nobody willing to pay for it. And I think, you know, that is a really hard balance where you wanna give it away for cheap or for free, but then how do you charge for it? Well, it's like, you've looked at c 15 t versus the competitors, we're giving away all of the value for free, you could say.

Like, you can host it yourself and never pay us a penny, and that would save you a $100,000. But you what they don't have with self hosting it is the liability of if you go to court and say this cookie banner was wrong, you don't have us to protect you. So it's actually the legal backing as well, the indemnification. So there's the hosting, the observability, indemnification, all these things on top, and this is something that we're still trying to find the balance on ourself where it's like, currently, we're so much cheaper than the competitors, and you say, well, you know what's coming down the line is price increases. But, actually, we think the cookie banner is the lost leader, the Trojan horse, the wedge into a much bigger market.

We think we should be giving away all these features for free to then say, okay. But you're gonna go pay a lawyer $15,000 to write your terms conditions when we could do it for half the price. That's just as good. Or better, we can do all these extra observability tools that we think are worth so much more paying for than just purely the the c 15 t open source framework. So that's that's one of the keys I think When I thought very early about building a dev tool, I I very much k crystallized down to three areas.

I was like, what are c 15 t and consent's biggest, like, points? The first one is being open source. You know, there is no other tool on the market that is as I don't know. Built open. Built open.

What's the word I'm looking for? Feature complete as c 15 t. The second one is that developer experience. We found out that obviously, when I was when I looked at it even before building c 15 t, there was no cookie banners that had that React experience or that Clerk like components or even Shad CN components. Nothing felt native to the code base.

They all felt like scripts that are added to the website very last minute, and I wanted to change that. I wanted to have the cookie banner feel like it was part of the code base. So that developer experience became one of the big points. So the the first one was obviously being open source, the second one was that developer experience, but the third one was the most interesting was performance. So we had spent a lot of time this year thinking about performance, and this is still a can that we're trying to crack is we realized that we by building things into the bundle meant the speed and the performance characteristics changed.

But what we what we didn't realize at the time was how much, and we was experimenting with, like, server side rendering, a cookie banner. And we would put that code in, and they'll go, but actually how much faster it is? How do you tell that this is fast or slow? So we decided that we need a benchmark. So we couldn't use Lighthouse because it wasn't quite the quite customizable enough, fine grain in the performance.

So we built a benchmarking tool called CookieBench and started benchmarking c 15 t to be like, we're putting all these, like, technologies in, like, server side rendering. Is it actually faster? Like, there's two different ways to do c 15 t. There's server side rendering where we look at things like geolocation. So if you're in The UK, you will see a cookie banner, but if you're in The US, you won't.

C 15 t is still running in the background, but in The US, it's enabling everything by default. In The UK, Europe, it's holding that until consent is given. So we we have a Next. Js version that does server side rendering, so that geolocation is built into the first request. So it will say, okay.

They're in The UK. Show them the cookie banner. Or there's the client side method that will load the website and then do a server request and then show the cookie banner. And both of them are like, okay. They're they're different methods for fetching the content.

One has zero third party requests. One has one third party request. Depends on the application to which one you want to use. And, like, both of them give different performance scores, and we saw that actually server side rendering it was faster to cookie banner showing. So we we said cookie banner visibility.

So this was, like, the the score that we saw was like how fast to render a cookie banner. And c 15 t is like seventy eight milliseconds. So that's from zero to the cookie banner is on the pages seventy eight milliseconds.

And that's like average

That's like or really fast.

So Oh, sorry. I meant like that's like

Oh, yeah. Average across yeah. The Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

So then Guillermo actually asked us, where's your competitors on this? So we started benchmarking the competitors as well, and we saw that C 15 t was seven times faster than the slowest one we benchmarked, but almost two times faster than the closest second. So then we put all these benchmarks online. So we said, hey. Here's all the different CMPs, and here's C15T at the top.

And you're like, it's The

CMP cons

consent management platform. Wonderful. So that's the cookie banner. That's the storing the consent in the database. So we we release this benchmark as like an open source.

Hey. We wanna tell you about performance. And we feel like we're only starting to really understand the performance problem. Obviously, c 15 t is the fastest, but it also extends further into the marketing scripts. So all all of the the biggest problems of, the web around performances, you see this all the time on Lighthouse score where, you know, you're a developer, you finish the website, all the Lighthouse scores are green.

You're like, I've done my job well. And then the marketers come along and the lawyers and say, okay. We need all of these analytical scripts and marketing scripts and conversion scripts. And the lawyers, we need a CMP. And then that lighthouse score drops to red, and you're like, what the hell happened?

The website was performing. And that's one of the core things we wanted to fix, and we have been obviously with with the c 15 t consent system because we also added in script management, so lazy loading all the scripts. So the website is more performant. And it's one of them really big things where it's hardly spoken about. It's hardly understood about, like, actually what is slowing down these websites, and it's why Versal has became a massive partner for us.

And speaking at NextConf was like to get the word out that, you know, what is slowing down your website is not actually Next. Js. It's the marketing scripts that are loaded on top that as a developer, you had no control over. And with c 15 t, this is actually the first system that you have control over that loads them in a performant way. I think going into next year, we'll only see this kinda like communication and marketing grow and grow and grow.

And hopefully, you know, I would love to see competitors do things our way because that would make the web a better place for everybody. You know? What we did with CookieBench was out a blueprint, a score, and we have said how to get a high score. And we've not hidden it. It's public because the more tools that work in the same way as c 15 t, the better the web is gonna be for everybody.

And I guess that's kinda like my goal is to make the web better for everyone. Imagine if we had great cookie banners across the board, people would probably hate them a lot less.

Yeah. And I guess Americans are not seeing like as like they don't like it's like I don't know. I guess this doesn't you can tell me, but like it's so annoying when you get you hit a website and you're like, okay, I'm on this website. And then like a second or two later, it's just like suddenly there's this pop up at the bottom. You can't do anything.

It just like freezes. You have to like scroll down. Sometimes like you have to like kinda scroll this little like pop up thing to close it or like

So that's actually something that I think about often is this like delay reaction is like, in Europe, we're so used to we load a website and then we kinda wait because we know something's coming, you know. But then and then it's really delayed and it's like that's why we built the benchmark. It's like it should be as fast as possible. It should be as fast as possible. Zero dark pens, get out your way.

And we have higher conversion than some some of the competitors because of it.

And conversion is

As you know, actually accepting it and not just declining it as fast as possible. But the other thing that is obviously so important here is that and this was something that Guillermo from Vercel was so upbeat about. He's like, I'm in The USA. I should not be seeing a cookie banner. And this was one of

things So that he'd he'd so people do get shown a lot.

Of course. Because some of the competitors don't even

They'll just do it to everyone.

Again again, yeah. Some of the competitors don't even geolocate. So it will show the cookie banner for everyone or a developer, I can do this in five minutes. It's just a div that I put on the page and a button, and we're done. So I know there's so much more that goes into it with geolocation, accepting, not accepting.

You know, I spoke to the founder of Resend, Xeno, and he literally said they have analytical scripts because who doesn't? But in Europe, all of them are disabled because he does not wanna put a cookie banner on the page. So he would rather disable all of the scripts, all the marketing scripts to track conversion and analytics and have not have a cookie banner on the page. That is changing, obviously, because he really likes c 15 d.

Okay. Nice.

But this was like the default in the market was like everything is so bad. And what's really exciting as well about c 15 t is that you can run it in a headless mode, so you can build your own interface that matches your company brand. So some of the biggest companies that are taking this into production, we're working with them and say, okay. You want to have a legal compliant system, but you want it to match your website. You want it to match the feel.

We can help do that. So that is like a big thing. It's like all of them are so ugly. I look at them and think, these are terrible experiences. These are like, nobody cares.

And it's like, why am I the guy that's became like, yeah, I really care about cookie banners. I really, you know, I think about the design of cookie banners all night. Keeps me up in bed. But I'm like, it's actually such a incredibly important thing. It's in Europe, it's the first thing that we see on our website.

But then, like, some things just don't make sense of them. It's like, why do you put why are the competitors putting the logo of the company on the cookie banner? It's like, you know you're on their website. Why do you need to see their logo? And it's like, we're trying to really think about what tomorrow's cookie banners look like and bring them today because the whole industry is just copy and pasting each other.

It's like, well, they all look like this. And it's something I I spent a lot of time thinking about. And the the funniest thing that I can always say is when I was in Everfund, you know, I thought that the Versal for x is done. We couldn't create another Versal of of x. And obviously, this is before AI agents and, you know, oh, we're the AI agent for Versal of x, but I was like, everything is done.

And then I've realized with Consent and NC 15, it's like, actually, no. With the Versailles of cookie banners, I'm like, that is such a funny statement because again, before starting consent, wasn't a cookie banner guy. I wasn't an expert. I never came about this from a lawyer point of view or a marketer point of view. I came out from the developer point of view, and that's actually what the whole market was missing.

The developer was never given a seat at the table, and we're the first tool to really give that developer a seat at the table. And that has been one of the biggest reasons we've grew so fast is because the developers are finally seen and heard, and we have built it specifically for them. And already in, like, calls with potential customers, they've gone, sadly, we we can't use you because you don't have these marketing features. Well, for the marketers, And, you know, the the first thinking would be, guys, we need to add we need to add these tools that the marketers need. But actually, I took a step back and went, actually, no.

They're the wrong customers for us. We need to continue going down the developer path. Mhmm. Because if we start trying to please the marketers and the lawyers, we're just gonna be the competitors, you know. We're gonna give the developer less control because we're giving the marketers the control.

So it was kinda like them anti patterns where you go, well, you know, if you need marketers, then we're not the right tool for you. We are the tool that the developers need, the developers care about performance, and even leakage. I read an article the other day that said that 70% of cookie banners are actually not compliant. For example and this is so easy. The quickest tell you can tell quickest tell?

One of quickest tells is if you decline all on a cookie banner, you shouldn't see the intercom widget. You shouldn't see the intercom widget. No YouTube no YouTube iframe should load. Like, so much of the websites yeah. Because

YouTube tracks you also.

YouTube's got tracking in. So any iframes technically should be disabled if you decline all. The chat widget shouldn't be there. You know, analytics should be turned off. Like, there's all these analytics that have came out saying, oh, there's no cookies.

It's GDPR compliant. But even I'm like, that shouldn't load. It's like, even if if a user truly doesn't want to be tracked, I think you should be an ethical company to say, okay. We won't track them. So even though, you know, you're an analyst, it's coming and say you don't need a cookie banner.

If the user doesn't wanna be tracked, let them not be tracked. You know? That's my efficacy about it. So and I've got into little fights with people online where they're like, well, you're putting our tool in the analytics category. It doesn't need to be there.

They don't need a cookie, but it's like, no. But it is analytics, and we need to stop thinking about these as cookie banners. We need to start thinking about what people are consenting to. And if they're clicking reject all, they obviously don't want to be tracked. And then it's that thing of the marketers go, well, with this tool, we've lost half of our conversion.

It's like, yes, because it's working as it should be, and that is not something that you can change. And it's like it's like finding that balance is really hard, but it's a it's a balance where I think as developers we need to push back on and say, no. This should be working as expected, and you should see a reclining in tracking. And that's the interesting thing where, you know, some people say, oh, I started using c 15 t and all my numbers went down. It's like, why do you think that is?

And it's like, because when people reject the consent, they're no longer tracking you. Like, as it should be done, you know, that is what the tools are set out for. So it's kind of a it's kind of a hard debate, but I feel like as the company, we should be standing on the ethical side always by saying, look, If your numbers have dropped, that is not our fault. That is giving your users the right choices to to to stop being tracked. You know?

I think that is key. So many of these systems are are set up incorrectly and, yeah, we just wanna fix that in the long run.

Yeah. And I guess, you know, the I guess the counter on that is that people can tell that story better. They can tell the story that we don't track you, but we do care about you then in the long run.

Exactly. And and this is a thing where I think if people actually know what is being done with their data, sometimes we would be more willing to give it. For example, if you knew that the website was gonna use your data for analytical purposes only, you'd probably be like, yeah. I couldn't care if you knew what pages I was viewing. But if you knew that they were gonna be using your data for advertisement or, like, follow you around the Internet, of course, you'd be like, why?

No way. And you see this. Not all cookie banners are made the same way. There's actually two different styles. There's the ones that you see on most websites, but then there's this very specific kind called an IAB TCF cookie banner.

And they are big words, but what does that mean? It's you go on a website and it says, we are gonna sell your data to a 180 vendors. That's an IAB TCF cookie banner. All the biggest companies use them, and the reason why is because they're a lot more transparent about where the data is actually going, and it's forced by the European Union. It's kind of great because you're like, ah, I understand.

But then, obviously, they try and put as many doc patterns into place to make sure you're giving all your data to all these different vendors. And it's like, for me, I'm trying to constantly think about, like, the middle ground of, you know, ethically giving your data, understanding what you're accepting to. But, again, if you don't want to, that is fine. It's like, people ask me, it's like, is it bad that I give all my data? You know?

It's like, no. If you're fine with that, you're fine with that. Some people or or they say, well, I use a I use an ad blocker, you know? That's not my problem. You know?

We are just giving you and the companies the tools to do things better. And another area that we will be tackling next year, and we're already working on, is terms conditions, legal policies. So one thing is obviously to have your legal policy. A lot of tools generate them for you. One of the other things we wanna do is this, like, innovation of nonlegal talk.

Like, imagine when you're looking for terms conditions, it says what it does as simply as possible in like a rich text interface.

So, yeah, some companies do this. Right? Like Yeah. Is it I can't remember the examples.

They're like, they they say like, the non

league I can imagine Posthog do that. Right?

Yeah. I don't know. We do it. So, like, if you sign up to consent, you will see this widget that's like our terms conditions and a legal system. That's actually the the prototype of this system.

Like, we're already dog feeding it internally, and you see that we have the the technical version and, like, the human version. And the human version is, like, high level. Here's what you're consenting to. Here's all the terms. And then, obviously, if you don't wanna accept, you you can click decline.

And I think this is a thing where people and especially, like, being a founder, it's like, I want to keep my terms, conditions, my privacy policy updated as much as possible. But do I actually know how to write that correctly? No. Do I miss out a vendor? Yes.

You know? We're working in this ecosystem that's changing so rapidly. You know, oh, we're trying this tool. We'll rid of this tool. We're trying this tool.

We'll get rid of this tool. And you technically need to keep your terms conditions up to date. And, you know, we see this change management system being a massive area as well where, you know, how many emails to get through? Where are they in our terms conditions? And it doesn't say actually what's changed.

So we wanna provide all this tooling as well to to our users. So when it comes to managing your startup or your company, you know, we're telling you, actually, your vendor has just changed their terms and conditions, and this how is how it affects your terms and conditions. And we think you should update your terms and conditions based off of this. It's this really interesting area that, you know, there's loads of tools out there already that can write your terms and conditions, but we think there's massive observability problems with them. And, again, it comes back to that efficacy and that thing of, like, I want to run a company that is as truthful with what we do with the data as possible.

Obviously, I'm not running a very shady marketing firm that, you know, may not want to be, But most SaaS products are like, look. We just wanna be honest. We just wanna tell the truth, but so many of the tools out there today are form driven development. Everything that we do, we want it to be observability driven. We want to be looking at your PRs and saying, hey.

This goes against your terms conditions. Are you sure you want to merge this? If you do, then we need to update your terms conditions. Interesting. You know?

That's cool.

Because not every developer knows the terms conditions. Yeah. Only the CTO or the lawyers will know. So there's all them kind of like observability tools, and it goes back to, like, why is the cookie ban on c 15 t so cheap? It's because we see it as the the the wedge into this much bigger ecosystem of tooling that we can provide to developers to keep the company far much more compliant.

And I I would say ethical, but really something we all wanna do, you know. We're not bad people. We don't think, oh, we're gonna put as many bad terms in our our terms conditions. We kinda just wanna go, is it done? Is it right?

Yes. Like, then the more and more cookie banners and and the privacy policies I look at and go, your privacy policy hasn't been updated in two years, and you've gone from inception to a series b company, and your privacy policy has never been changed. Something is wrong there. You know? I think it's also this thing of, like, we spoke about, like, generating your your terms and conditions, but also you you may be a size of company where you have lawyers on hand to do this.

But then you have to explain to the lawyers what has changed. Yeah. So we see this as two paths where we can either provide AI generated documents or tell the lawyers, hey, this is what's changed. You go write it on. What that actually means to

you. You know?

Yeah. It's because obviously they have indemnity if they write it wrong

Yeah.

When obviously legally AI generated or binary tree generated documents don't have that amenity. I obviously, that puts into two different price points. So that is something that we spend a lot of time thinking about, and we'll be releasing these tools in year two next year.

Yeah. That's probably interesting. I do think there's, like, this category of, like, products. Have you come across revenue cap?

Yeah. I don't know much about them, but I know of them. I had the pitch pitched to me at a conference, but they're like all in one tax, billing, all this kind of

stuff.

Right? Exactly. So like in app subscriptions for so they market to mobile devs. And one of the things that so that was like one of the tools that I really liked just from like a user a few years ago when I worked at a mobile app startup. And one of the ways they framed it was like and and I think this was so true is like it's like one of those categories that you think is easy.

So like as a dev like you're you know, one of the founders of a startup you're like, hey, can you just implement we wanna start charging money like, hey, go implement in app subscriptions. And it's like, okay, this should be really easy like, you know, let's let's get this done by the end the week or whatever. Like and I remember like it was not easy. It's like it was really tricky and really fiddly and there's like so much terminology and so much like, feels like one of those things where it's like, I could imagine someone's like, oh, can we just make a cookie add a cookie banner like I don't know. Like in my head like before speaking to you I'm like, how long would that take?

Like couple hours? Like less than that? Like just get it done. There's probably like a package for that. Just like smash it in.

But it's like and I think when it's one of those ones where there's like a disconnect between like what people think it will take and what it won't. I think you can get a lot of like dev love because like you're kind of saving it's almost like embarrassment or shame because then you just can't explain it to like the rest of the team why there's such, like, taking you way longer than, you know

Exactly.

Yeah.

I I think this is like there's so many edge cases. And for example, GDPR. UK GDPR, EU GDPR are two separate things, and they have diverted. So UK GDPR is going one direction, EU GDPR is going in another direction, and what that means for cookie banners are two separate things. So, you know, if you're a UK startup, you could be implementing the wrong specification.

I personally think that actually caring about GDPR is too low level of of distraction. We how we think about regulations is we give you the components, and as a developer, you implement that component, you customize it, and then it's done. You shouldn't have to think about UK GDPR, EU GDPR. They're too low level. We can't think of the same way as like Stripe.

Before Stripe, you know, if you wanted to make a payment, you'd have to go to a bank and then have another bank in another country, know each other to, you know, handle cross continent payments. But now you know how to make a Stripe payment because they've increased abstraction to a high level. We think about the all of this, like, regulatory tech in the same way as in, you know, trying to spend your time understanding it. It's just it's a it's not a waste of time, but it's it's very specific knowledge.

As a founder, like Well, I I would put my neck on so it kind of is a waste of time in a way. Right? I don't know. For me, I would think like, who cares? Like, we need to do we need this, but like, if I can spend zero minutes on this, like ten minutes, or I can spend two hours, like like, I should not handcraft this stuff, like

Exactly. Yeah. It's And like there's the other thing of, like, oh, but the EU is not gonna come after me. You know, we're a tiny startup.

The EU

I would also think that. Is that not true?

It's it's it is and it isn't true because different territories will come at you at different times depending on where your users are and how much money you're generating. But it's also the thing of, yeah, but your users care, your users notice when there isn't one of these things. And, you know, if it if it is ten minutes for peace of mind to just be like, we know we then handle GDPR, then why wouldn't you just do it to get it out of the way?

And by the way, to be clear, when I say they should do it, I mean

It's like

it's like if they can use you guys and just get it done, it makes it's like spending it'd be if they could go from a week to like ten and minutes, it's like then they're like, I don't know anything about it, but I know that we're sorted because we're using you guys. Exactly. It's like, that makes sense to me where it's like, that's that's great. Like

Yeah. And, like, the other thing we think about is, like, for example, California, CCPA. When you're not from California, you have no clue what CCPA even is. So it's like, okay. Handling that.

Canada's privacy laws. You know, Brazil has privacy laws. Even Saudi Arabia is adding privacy laws. India is adding privacy laws. All of these things are globally things that you shouldn't have to worry about.

One of the fun facts I know to close this out is, for example, in The US, obviously, each state has different laws when it comes to privacy. California is one of the leaders, and this is I love this, but any Californian citizen can sue a technology company for, like, leaking their data or privacy or any of these things. But then in places like Utah, only the district attorney can sue a tech company. So it's that thing of, like, that is low level knowledge that as a founder, you won't know about, but as what we're doing is, like, we're telling you it's like, oh, these are all the different states. Here's their privacy laws.

Here's what you have to worry about. Here's what you don't have to worry about. If you leak data, you know, in California, it's it's I think it's seven days that you have to announce it. But then in other states, it's like a 180. It's like so different.

And that's just America where they go, we don't have to worry about GDPR. It's like all of this stuff is is so important and we just wanna give them observability tools to say, hey, you're gonna use consents and c 15 t and we'll handle everything else for you.

Yeah. That's awesome. Very cool. Okay. Amazing.

Well, Chris. This has been fun.

Yeah. This has been fun. So glad that we could actually do this. And in London, so In London. Big In Big up London.

In the farmhouse. Yes.

In Central London.

The farmhouse in Central London.

Very much so. Yeah. Everyone check out c 15 t. Get compliant. And Yeah.

And just trust Chris to sort it out for you.

Yeah. See you all soon. Bye.

See you. Thanks everyone for listening. Bye.