by Shane Kenny, founder of Filtersnap
I love the fast-paced, see-my-work-have-a-big-impact nature of a new startup. I love it so much that, since middle school, I have been part of starting eight businesses. Admittedly, they have not all been successful. Some have been spectacular failures. Despite this, I have been drawn by the siren call of the startup once again. I am now neck-deep in Startup No. 9, FilterSnap.
In 1999, my brother Aaron and I started InternetSafety.com. That was right at the peak of what some would later call the “dotbomb era”. It seemed as though venture capitalists were throwing money at any Internet idea they could find – no business plan required. We wanted in.
Our idea was to build a dial-up Internet service to compete with AOL, MindSpring and EarthLink. Our difference was that we included an Internet filter so that parents could control the type of content their kids could access while online.
It was a great idea. There was just one problem. Soon after we launched, dial-up began its slow, miserable death at the hands of broadband. We had to pivot if we were going to survive. In a flash of brilliance, we took our dial-up filter technology and built a software product that would run on any computer regardless of its Internet connection type. We didn’t know it at the time, but we had just saved our business.
We called this new product Safe Eyes. We had no experience in running an Internet filtering software business, but this didn’t concern us. We put our heads down, worked hard, and learned as we went. It worked. In June of 2005 while on vacation with my wife, I received a call from my brother. Safe Eyes had been named the #1 parental control product out of 11 products tested by Consumer Reports.
This rating put Safe Eyes on the map. We had beaten out products from Microsoft, AOL and Symantec. The best part was that it was a blind review. We didn’t even know they were doing it.
The next five years were a whirlwind. We hired a CEO to help us build the business. We received a venture capital investment. We did projects with the Australian Federal Government and McAfee. Our little business grew from four employees to over 30.
In 2010, the “we did it” moment arrived. We received an offer from McAfee to acquire our 11-year-old company. After months of due diligence and reviewing hundreds of pages of contracts, McAfee acquired InternetSafety. com for over $10 million on December 2, 2010.
After the acquisition, I managed the Safe Eyes team at McAfee for two years. In the end, they laid off my entire team. I had been planning to leave anyway. They just made the decision for me before I had a chance to make it. I took a few months off to travel, play golf, and generally live as if I was retired. I quickly became bored so I started doing some consulting work. This helped with the boredom, but it also started feeding my desire to start something of my own again.
The result was FilterSnap. The idea grew from my own struggle to remember to change my home’s air filters every three months. I figured other people had the same problem and came up with a plan to build a service that would send me my filters when it was time to change them. The arrival of the box would be my reminder, and I would avoid the frustration of going to the store only to realize I could not remember which filter size I needed. It would be like Dollar Shave Club, but for my house.
Officially launched in November 2014, FilterSnap offers 72 filter sizes and a choice of 1, 2, 3, 6 or 12-month replacement schedules. The service helps customers save money because clean filters use less energy and help avert costly repairs. We are still very much in the startup phase. But I am back in that fast-paced, see-my-work-have-a-big-impact startup mode and loving every minute of it. I’m not sure where this journey will end. Some days I think that Startup No. 9 will be my last. Others, I think, “Who am I kidding?” This time next year or the year after, I might be working on No. 10 and just as exhilarated by the ride as I’ve been since I first felt the thrill of starting my own business back in middle school.
Founder of Filtersnap Shane Kenny has been in the filtering business for over 15 years. In 1999, he started InternetSafety.com with his brother. Together they built Safe Eyes, the top-rated Internet filtering software product for parents. After selling InternetSafety.com to McAfee, Shane started looking for his next project. One day it dawned on him that if replacing his air filters was such a hassle for him, it had to be a hassle for plenty of others. From this initial idea, FilterSnap and the concept of filters delivered to your door when you need them was born.
