Paul Ashley: Will Consumers Pay for an Identity Product?

Today’s guest is Paul Ashley, CTO and co-CEO of Anonyome Labs. Paul starts by talking about how the erosion of privacy online and the rise of data brokers and surveillance capitalism led them to create their IDtech product MySudo. MySudo is a privacy application that allows users to create secure digital profiles, or personas, with unique disposable phone numbers, emails, credit cards, and other identifiers to use across the internet.With hundreds of thousands of users, MySudo has defied conventional wisdom that consumers won’t pay for identity services, making it among a handful of successful, sustainable IDtech businesses. Paul breaks down how they’ve succeeded by taking a practical product approach and by talking about use cases rather than features.Our conversation naturally led to a discussion about how decentralized identity fits into their roadmap, which Paul called the biggest privacy breakthrough of the next decade. We talk about some of the opportunities and challenges in this nascent space, including navigating the complex technology landscape, how to find good problems for decentralized identity to solve first, and how their experience building what some would call a “web2” identity product is informing the way they tackle the UX of verifiable credentials.This is a conversation that will interest anyone who has a passion for privacy and safety online and will be very insightful for anyone building a consumer identity product.To learn more about MySudo and Anonyome Labs or to get in contact with a team member, visit https://anonyome.com/.Download MySudo on the Apple Store. Download MySudo on Google Play.Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.