A Solo Founder's Privacy Search App Grew to 11,000 Searches With Almost No Ad Spend

Who built it, and what they built

Rajat Vaghani is a solo founder based in Bengaluru, Karnataka, India. His product, Snap Search, is an Android app that lets people search the web without being tracked, with an iOS version still in development.

The app strips away the usual baggage of browsing, handling ads, trackers, cookies and cache on the user's behalf. He positions it as a tool for anyone who goes online, at a time when privacy controversies surface constantly.

Where the idea came from

Rajat moved to Bangalore five years earlier for a Master's degree in Computers, and threw himself into the local tech scene: hackathons, developer conferences, workshops, an internship and a well-paid full-time job. Along the way he sold three of his own apps to a US startup, but none of that could calm the entrepreneur in him.

He has been building and coding since age 13, and was 25 at the time of the story. The idea for Snap Search came from personal irritation: after Googling something one day, he saw suggestions and news about that query follow him around, and Instagram hinted at it the next day, even though he had used incognito mode.

He decided there had to be a way to search favorite websites quickly without being tracked. His day job as lead software developer at a top VPN company gave him hands-on experience in user privacy, which fed directly into building the app.