Company: Termageddon
Owners: Hans Skillrud
Year Started: 2017
Employees: 1 – 10
In this episode of An Agency Story, host Russel Dubree dives into the surprisingly dynamic and crucial world of website policies with Hans Skillrud, co-founder of Termageddon. From a journey at the early days of Groupon to building and selling an agency, Hans shares his entrepreneurial path and how marrying a privacy attorney completely reshaped his career…and possibly yours.
Discover how Termageddon is revolutionizing website policy management with a mix of simplicity, affordability, and legal savvy. Hans explains the hidden risks lurking behind those “copy-paste” policies and reveals how ignoring privacy laws could cost businesses lots of headaches and money.
Hans breaks down legal jargon and turns an unsexy topic into a fascinating, practical conversation to solve this pesky, but important problem. He even shares a hilarious and cringe-worthy story when a client blamed YouTube’s “suggested videos” for their NSFW browser history!
If you’ve ever underestimated the importance of website policies, this episode will change your perspective and potentially save your client’s business. Don’t miss out. Tune in now and discover how to turn compliance into a competitive advantage.
Enjoy the story.
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Show Transcript
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. From the excitement of starting up the first big sale, passion, doubt, fear, freedom, and the emotional rollercoaster of growth, hear it all on An Agency Story podcast. An Agency Story podcast is hosted by Russel Dubree, successful agency owner with an eight figure exit turned business coach. Enjoy the next agency story.
Russel:
Welcome to An Agency Story podcast, I’m your host Russell. On this episode, we have Han Skillrud co-founder of Termageddon. Termageddon creates and automatically updates all things, privacy policies based out of Chicago, Illinois. Hans certainly faced a tough call when he decided to sell his agency and concentrate on building out Termageddon and hasn’t looked back ever since. In this episode, we discuss the challenges that agencies and businesses of all types face in keeping up with privacy policies. As agencies we’ve dealt with copyright trolls, accessibility, trolls, and run the cusp of an era of privacy trolls. Listen to how Termageddon and other similar competitors have solved this very unsexy, but important element in the modern age of website compliance. You also want to listen at the end, as he shares an embarrassing story for the client that is about their browser history. Enjoy the story. Welcome to the show today, everyone. I have Hans Skillrud with term again, here with us. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Hans.
Hans:
I really appreciate you having me Russel. Thank you.
Russel:
Glad to have you. If you don’t mind, start us off with a quick overview. What does Termageddon do and who do you do it for?
Hans:
Absolutely. Termageddon is a website policies generator. Don’t leave the podcast immediately. I promise it’s slightly more entertaining than it sounds. We provide privacy policies, terms, cookie policies, policies that help website owners comply with laws and limit their liability. Our business model is kind of unique. We’re 119 bucks a year, uh, but our model is specifically, really, we built Termogeddon for agencies. We give agencies a free set of our auto updating policies in the hopes that you like it and take the time to set up comprehensive policies for your own website. If you like what you see, you can use our reseller or affiliate programs to offer our solution to your clients so your clients can get protected and you can make a new recurring revenue stream as well.
Russel:
All right, goal with the podcast today. We’re going to get people excited about internet policies and website policies. we’re going to do our best work today here.
Hans:
Yes. Buckle in.
Russel:
Yes. I want to find out more about that. From our first conversation, I got excited about policies. But before we get to all that, what was young Hans thinking he was going to do with his life long before Termageddon was a thing?
Hans:
I started off my career as one of the first employees over at Groupon. Groupon was, at the time, a startup, um, starting to gain some attraction. I think I was like the 80th employee, which sounds like a lot, but they went to 33, 000 employees two years later. I absolutely loved the model when it first started, like, hey, for one day, only, you know, we’re offering this deal to this company you’ve been meaning to go to, but you haven’t actually taken the effort to go there. Kind of like a restaurant like Portillo’s. I don’t know. Some people have just never been there, but they want to try it out eventually.
Russel:
I used to be an avid Groupon user for that reason. I liked Groupon a lot.
Hans:
That’s awesome. Texas was my market, so I might’ve actually set you up with a deal. Who knows? As time went on, I felt like Groupon kind of lost its luster in the sense that I felt like we just were discounting small business owners just to bring kind of coupon hungry people to a business who are never coming back. I started to lose like my interest in the model. I started to think like, well, these websites, these business owners are so good at what they do, but they’re just not good at bringing that online. That was kind of the fuel to the fire for why I sold my stock at that company, um, and, and started an agency. Specifically helping small business owners, you know, create a presence online and represent what they do online with how good they do it inside their store. I started running an agency. We were like a full service, you know, we’re offering everything from email setups to new websites to social media marketing. I lost a lot of hair during those years, figuring out that doing everything is not for everyone. I actually closed in on just offering web design services. That’s where the company kind of started to hit off. Grew it to a 12 person team in downtown Chicago. Coincidentally, I started to date a privacy attorney and I told her I copied and pasted privacy policies whenever my clients would ask me to add them. She told me, you realize that’s a bad idea, right? I’m like, yeah, good point. One story led to the other and we built Termageddon and, uh, it started taking off. I actually had to make the very difficult decision to sell my agency, uh, to go full time Termageddon, uh, to build off the company.
Russel:
Okay. First question, is Groupon still around? I’ve probably not used Groupon in 10 years. Does it still exist?
Hans:
I think so. I’ve been monitoring their stock just a little bit out of spite, a little bit out of curiosity. The stock has gone down since I was there, uh, like eight years ago. I’m not responsible for that. I didn’t mean it to come off that way. I left and the company went down. No, no, no. I was just a cog in the wheel. But, um, yeah, I do believe they are still publicly traded.
Russel:
Really?
Hans:
Probably a discounted group on pricing too.
Russel:
Groupon for Groupon?
Hans:
Yeah. Oh man. They’re up 63 percent in the last three months.
Russel:
Well, look at that.
Hans:
But down 92 percent in the last five years.
Russel:
Okay. It sounds like you got out a good time and if the shoe doesn’t fit, uh, stop wearing it. Moved into what you’re doing now. You married a data privacy attorney and that changed your life, you started Termageddon.
Hans:
Yes. That’s what I like to share with agencies. I was like, I married a privacy attorney so no one else has to. My job is to get everyone educated on privacy policies, what they’re all about, why they’re important, why we can’t keep our, you know, head in the sand. I actually encourage embracing this stuff rather than trying to hide from it. I think it’s just a better way to represent your agency professionally. The fact is regulations are here, whether you like it or not, and you should get documentation in place for your own agency at the very least, where your clients are acknowledging that they’re responsible for website policies, not you, at the very least.
Russel:
Let’s talk, let’s dive into that. Why is it so darn important? Where’s an agency at risk when it comes to being involved in this whole policy mess?
Hans:
My inner wife alarm bells are going off and I should note, please note everything I share today is for informational purposes only, should not be considered legal advice and so forth. I’m talking as a non attorney, but I would say that agencies are relatively safe, building out websites. Regardless of whether they tell their clients, they now may be legally responsible to have policies. With that said, if I’m a website owner and I hired an agency to build me a website and they told me nothing about my legal requirements to have policies and then I end up getting slapped with a 14, 000 dollar fine or even possibly a lawsuit, very first people I’m going to, to call is the agency who built me the website and be like, why the heck didn’t you tell me this? I think that’s where there’s a lot of confusion in this space. Agencies don’t want to feel like they have to get a law degree to be able to explain what policies are. They also shouldn’t be responsible for policies for their clients. But in my opinion, I think it’s a very professional idea. It’s a good idea, long term strategy, to just educate the clients about what they are, how they’re beneficial. A privacy policy helps you comply with privacy laws. It’s that simple. Failure to comply with privacy laws, the fines start at 2, 500 dollars per website visitor. There are states in the US that are proposing bills that will enable consumers of those states to sue any website owner for collecting as little as an email address on a contact form. Without proper New York privacy law disclosures or, uh, Virginia privacy law disclosures. The fact is, is more privacy laws are passing to protect people’s data. If you have a website collecting data across state lines or even country lines, you may need to comply with a multitude of privacy laws. Because privacy laws protect people, not businesses, so what matters is whose data are you collecting and do you have to comply with their laws? And if you do, you need to get the disclosures required under each and every one of those laws. Sounds like a mouthful, but long story short, privacy policies help you comply with laws and thus limit your liability by reducing your chances of being fined or potentially even sued if some of those bills pass.
Russel:
2, 500 dollars a visitor. I can’t do the math on that, but I know it’s a big number for majority of sites, really honestly. That’s nothing to shake a stick at.
Hans:
It really isn’t. That law, actually, that’s the minimum fine, um, and it’s from California. California’s second privacy law, CPRA, where the minimum fine is 2, 500 dollars per Californian whose rights you’ve infringed upon. You might be in, like, Nebraska or Texas, and you get 100 visitors from California, and if you’re getting fined, that’s 100 times 2, 500 dollars. 250k. That’s just painful. Trust me when I say like, I, I mean, I used to copy and paste privacy policies for my clients, I’ve downplayed privacy policies for the longest time. it’s just, the era is changing. More and more laws have passed. Since we last chatted and we just chatted a few weeks ago, um, we’ve had three more laws pass and we’ve had four privacy laws go into effect since we last chatted. Times are changing. You got to get in front.
Russel:
Before Termageddon, it probably would be people’s first course of instinct would be to go block people from California visiting websites, right? As an act of self protection, but going back to what you mentioned, and may have been guilty for this on a number of websites, is the old copy paste, uh, policy method. Why is that such a bad thing?
Hans:
Taking someone else’s content is a form of copyright infringement, but even outside of that, what we tend to see is that when you copy and paste someone else’s legal documents, I have yet to see someone actually provide a compliant privacy policy with the privacy laws that specifically apply to that business owner. They’re either missing disclosures or they’ve completely butchered what they were supposed to state. Somehow, if you were able to copy a legal document and it’s somehow exactly matched your own business practices and like, provided exactly what you’re responsible for disclosing, it still wouldn’t answer the question of how do I keep that policy up to date over time? Unless your strategy is to constantly refresh the page of that competitor website that you just copied a legal document from, like, there’s no strategy to keep up to date. Five days prior to the time of this recording, we had four privacy laws go into effect all with new disclosure requirements, if applicable to your business. If this is news to you, um, what I would recommend agencies understand is that they need to have a relationship with a privacy attorney or consider working with a generator that’s, you know, keenly focused on monitoring this stuff, uh, to keep them educated and aware of what’s going on.
Russel:
That is probably, to the whole point, when you’re copying, pasting, one, they probably copy and paste it. Where does that old copy paste trail end and begin?
Hans:
Yes.
Russel:
Because I highly doubt many people in the web space that do the copy paste method, actually reading it. It solves a bucket that you can check off and move on to the more important tasks, you know, like, uh, billing, SEO and all that stuff. How does it work? If you’re talking about all this laws and all this legal stuff changing all the time, how the heck do you guys keep up with this?
Hans:
The best way, without a doubt, is to hire a privacy attorney to help you figure out the laws that apply to you and then get all the disclosures created for you and draft your policy and then have a strategy to keep it up to date over time.
Russel:
That sounds expensive.
Hans:
With that being said, I don’t think a lot of business owners have the type of funds to support that type of investment for their website privacy policy. A lot of small business owners are considering generators. The con to a generator like Termageddon is that they’re not legal service providers. You can’t like call us and ask for legal advice on what to do. You kind of go through a questionnaire and that does the trick. What’s cool about Termageddon, and I believe we are still the only company doing this, is that our tool starts off with a privacy law identifier. Meaning that you go through a series of questions that first figure out what laws apply. I’m still kind of shocked that our competitors aren’t addressing that, because how do you know what disclosures you need to make unless you know what laws apply to you? That’s step one, which Termageddon is. You go through a series of questions to find out the laws that apply to you. Then our questionnaire adapts and asks you the questions necessary to make those respective disclosures under the specific privacy laws that apply to you. Once you’re done generating your policies, you get a little embed code, which you copy and paste them to the body of your policy page. When people visit your website, they visit your policy page, they see your policies, but what’s happening there is that embed code is, uh, that’s coming from our servers. That is what allows us to monitor these changes, notify you of changes, and even push automatic update to your policy pages with new disclosures.
Russel:
Sounds like a lot of moving parts, or you just have a whole team of people that just read legal documents all day long?
Hans:
Excellent question. We actually only have one attorney on staff, our founder and president, Donata. I’m a little biased given that she’s my wife and my boss, um, in life and business. Donata’s also the chair of the American Bar Association’s ePrivacy Committee. About 500 privacy attorneys report to her and then she provides guidance to legislators on how to write privacy laws. She’s interviewed countless heads of privacy, of like the CDC and Pfizer and Uber and all those things. She’s very involved in the privacy community, um, and not just the US. She’s friends with the person who wrote Canada’s privacy law. She gets on the phone with the attorney generals of these people. We spend way too much money, uh, licensing software that monitors bills and, um, and tracks these laws as well.
Russel:
That sounds like a whole nother exciting industry of bill monitoring software. Wow. Things you didn’t know existed.
Hans:
It is an expensive, expensive fee. There’s only one company doing it. They raise their prices every month, but we happily pay it. They do a good job.
Russel:
Sounds like part and parcel important to your service. Historically, web developers have solved this, the easiest method possible, copying and pasting. It sounds like you’ve kind of gotten this down to maybe just a little more effort than a copy paste, but that is really not too intensive.
Hans:
That’s a good way to look at it. I’ve never heard it say that, be said that way, but that’s a, um, that’s true. It should be like our tagline, like, Termageddon: with like a tiny bit more effort, you are like significantly better off, um, you know, your strategy, to keeping up to date with this stuff. That’s kind of the essence of it. I kind of like to think about it. Do you remember like when SSL certificates weren’t technically required? You get them for e-commerce websites and like, you know, everyone else is kind of like, ah, it looks nice. But you know, nowadays you go to a website that isn’t secure, like, I don’t know about you, but I don’t feel secure when I go to a website that’s not SSL secured. I think we’re going to see the same with privacy. There’s more enforcements occurring and we can get into that. It’s not just Meta and Google getting fined billions of dollars. There are one person marketing shops being fined six figures for non compliance. It just doesn’t cover the news, but I’m happy to provide articles. What’s going to happen is just like with SSL certificates, like we’re going to look back at these times and be like, remember when we used to just take people’s data and do whatever we want with it? That time is coming.
Russel:
That might be a great segue and talk about what, you know, what enforcement, is this a real risk? And what does that actually look like? I’ve been a little removed from the agency space from a personal standpoint for a couple of years, but, um, we were getting into the era of accessibility and starting to see, we helped several clients through some lawsuits and, and things like that for accessibility. It seemed like over time it started with the really big companies and then got into some of, you know, smaller markets and smaller type companies. How is enforcement looking in the, in the world as far as this is concerned?
Hans:
I’m glad you brought up accessibility because I think, what accessibility is in terms of like lawsuits being issued, privacy is about four or five years behind. Um, so just now more people are getting privacy rights than ever before. Um, and more enforcements are being done than ever before as well. The writing is on the wall that this is going to become more important, not less important over time. That’s why I encourage agencies to like, just get your free license from Termageddon, at the very least. Why not take advantage of that? There’s a website called GDPR Enforcement Tracker, or maybe it’s just EnforcementTracker.com. Google search GDPR Enforcement Track. You’ll find it and you’ll actually be able to see all the enforcements coming out of GDPR specifically. Um, that’s the only one central website that covers, um, enforcement of a particular privacy law. Then there’s all these other lawsuits and everything that have happened, especially in the US, um, that aren’t like, like aggregated in one central source. But I think that’s a really good example that demonstrates what’s happening here. Yes, you’re going to see the big firms getting fined tens, hundreds of millions of dollars, but what you’re also going to see is one person companies getting hit hard with these five, six figure fines, you know, for changing the email address of one of their subscribers without their consent. It’s getting wild. That would be a good website to check out to kind of validate this stuff.
Russel:
I think akin to like copyright trolls and when you start to see, you know, where it’s worth for, uh, at a smaller scale for, for people just to sit around and go after small businesses and, you know, hit them. They’re not going to probably file major lawsuits, but they’re going to do the whole, you know, pay 3, 500 dollars or, um, or we will sue. Just sometimes that, that threat is, you know, gets a lot of people to, um, unfortunately pay there. Thank you for the education on that. Quick little segue. Honestly, and this is, this is no BS. I am kind of fascinated by this topic, uh, of, of something that, you know, honestly, I will say never interested in me before we had a conversation. You talk about all these softwares that you’re paying for and all this work you have to do to kind of stay on top of this and provide this service. I’d be sitting here thinking this is, can’t be cheap. Or at least, you know, it’s a cost that someone would have to think about. What is this cost? What do you charge? How does that whole model work for you?
Hans:
We wanted Termageddo n to be as simple as possible with pricing because we really want agencies considering recommending us. I just kind of thought what I want is an agency. I want simple pricing. I have enough on my plate. So we’re just one annual fee, 119 bucks a year, and you get a full set of policies, privacy policy, cookie policy, cookie consent solution, terms, disclaimers and end user license agreements if you need them, um, all for 119 bucks a year, um, and that protects one website. 119 bucks a year per website. When you apply to be an agency partner, we just look at your website, make sure you offer web design services, we approve you, give you one of those licenses for free forever. No credit card required. Nothing like that. It’s truly to get you to try us out. If you like what you see, you can buy at wholesale rates, which are at a fraction of the cost of the 119 a year, um, allowing you to resell it at the full 119 a year. I’m thinking here, agencies are like, well, I don’t want to deal with my clients policies. And I, I agree, um, a hundred percent. That is why each Termageddon license has a user’s tab where you can share access with your client. For resellers, what you do is you share access to your client. They not only get an access to the questionnaire and the policies, the ability to customize policies, your client can even share it with their attorney if they want to, uh, which we welcome. Attorneys tend to love us because they don’t even want to deal with privacy. What’s great is that once you share access with your client, we can notify your client directly when new laws go into effect, when their policies specifically are being impacted by changing legislation, that way you don’t have to ever feel like you’re responsible after, you know, just sharing access with the client. You just share and move on to the next client.
Russel:
Probably sounds like, um, um, you know, nobody’s gonna, um, buy a Ferrari off of their, uh, Termageddon, reseller fees, but you’re, pay for the company soda fund and solve. It’s almost like the cheap world’s cheapest insurance policy, as I’m listening to all this.
Hans:
My cheapest hosting plan was 99 bucks a year, or 99 bucks a month, um, for my clients. I kinda like to think of it, it’s like, okay, I’m kind of getting like a 13th month of hosting. That’s how I kind of mentally make it make sense.
Russel:
Yeah, I like that. As you look at just the overall business of Termageddon, um, what does the future look like? What are the future plans?
Hans:
We are amidst a complete re-engineering of our, our application. Actually, we’re launching a new interface in September. I have personally talked to thousands of clients that have been referred to us by agencies. We offer like, you know, calls for your clients and stuff like that to help them answer the questionnaire. Our new interface is really taking all those thousands of calls and putting in our insights into like what we’ve learned and trying to make the setup experience as fast as possible. That’s really, I think where our goal is. We are, without a doubt, the most comprehensive generator in the market. We now want to compete against being the fastest. Comprehensiveness will never be sacrificed with our business. Not with our attorney president running the show, uh, no way. But we can make goals to, uh, improve efficiency. We’ve got some really nifty, uh, items up, up, uh, that are coming up later this year, uh, which I, I’m starting to remember. I don’t think I can share them actually right now.
Russel:
Ah, dangit.
Hans:
Yeah, again, my inner wife alarm bells are going off. I’m like, okay, I probably can’t share this just yet. But if there’s any takeaway from it, it’s the, the business model we run is we just listen to our partners and just do what they ask. That seems to be working really well. So we’re going to continue to go on that route and, um, we’ve accumulated quite a few pieces of feedback that I think are going to take us to the next level.
Russel:
Probably just the best fundamental business concept there is in the world is, uh, listen to what your customers want and, uh, and give it to them. Can’t go wrong with that.
Hans:
No, a good example is, um, one of our agencies are like, I wish you would provide us like a waiver that we could like have our clients sign. It’s like a document where clients can acknowledge, like, I understand that you built my website. You built the functionalities that could potentially collect regulated data, like names and emails through a contact form, or maybe IP address through analytics tools or security tools. I understand you implemented that, but I’m not responsible for your policies. Please, you know, sign this waiver and the client signs that waiver and that protects the agency, no matter what option that client chooses. But one of the options is to sign up with Termageddon and most agencies are reporting like 75 percent of their new clients or more, uh, will sign up with Termageddon. That’s a really good example, the agency recommended that, and now it’s our biggest asset for agencies. Because it’s great. It’s not salesy. It’s just like, hey. I built your website, but I’m not responsible for your policies. What do you want to do about it? They have the option to, you know, hire their attorney, choose Termageddon, or they can choose to do nothing, um, and that’s fine in my opinion. They’re a business owner. They get to make that decision if they want to comply with laws or not. But you, the agency need to protect your own business when building these sites, because you’re building the sites. The sites you build today are going to be facing the privacy laws of tomorrow. Get the protections in place is my opinion.
Russel:
Listen to your customers and give it to them. Folks, Hans did not pay me on any portion of this show to do this. I am genuinely bringing this because, uh, this is a great service that I do actually believe in and for a great price. Just got all the mechanics, um, for something that solves so many challenges the agencies don’t know they might need to solve. Hopefully people have been inspired and are now excited about website policies. My last big question for you, ask everyone on the show, Hans, is are entrepreneurs born or are they made?
Hans:
I think they are made, but I think, personally, it was made very early in life. I was fortunate in life. My family has done well for themselves, but I didn’t know that ever. In fact, my parents always told me they were poor and couldn’t afford, like, I never, I never got money to go to the mall just to put in perspective. I had a nice life, but they always told me I was poor, so I was always scrapping, trying to figure out how to make money. I think in an early age, I got a, a complete desperation out of wanting to take care of my parents. Cause I thought they were broke. That’s carried with me ever since then. I like helping people. I think that’s what agencies are. We fundamentally just want to help people. And I think what agencies, the trick is, is how do I make sure I take care of myself as well? I think that’s the entrepreneurial drive that I think carries it all for all of us.
Russel:
One, I think my dad told me the exact same thing, um, uh, growing up and to the whole point, yeah, I never, I never even bothered asking for money cause I, you know, I knew it was going to be a fight, so might as well go make it myself. Love that answer. If people want to know more about Termageddon, where can they go?
Hans:
Termageddon.com. So it’s like term age, ddon, D D O N. Termageddon.com. In our footer, we have all our social media links, um, and feel free to click agency partners and apply, um, at the bottom of the form. If you mentioned Russel or An Agency Story, we’ll make sure to hook you up with a second free license too.
Russel:
Awesome. Thank you for that. Folks, you know where to get it. You should never copy and paste a policy again, you have the solution. You can get it free for yourself so there is no excuses. Thank you so much for being on the show today, Hans, learned so much, very fascinated. I really appreciate your time today.
Hans:
Thanks so much for having me, Russel.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this episode of An Agency Story podcast where we share real stories of marketing agency owners from around the world. Are you interested in being a guest on the show? Send an email to podcast@performancefaction.com. An Agency Story is brought to you by Performance Faction. Performance Faction offers services to help agency owners grow their business to 5 million dollars and more in revenue. To learn more, visit performancefaction.com.
Hans:
This was back in my agency days, um, so we had a client that we built, just built a website for, embedded, a bunch of YouTube videos and so forth. Called us the next day after reviewing it, freaking out, being like, I cannot believe you’ve done this. So upset, and we were just dumbfounded. He kept saying that there’s, there’s inappropriate, not safe for work, I’m not going to say it out loud, suggested videos after he watches the embedded YouTube videos on his website. We had to explain to him that that was based on his own browser history. And we never heard from again, he paid his bill. He didn’t do hosting. He just went, uh, I think it was too embarrassing for him. I’ll always remember that moment. Cause I was sitting there stressing like, oh my gosh, what did we do wrong? After a ton of research, we’re like, wait. This is just his browser history.
Russel:
Oh gosh.
Hans:
That was a tough conversation to have.
Russel:
I can imagine that. I feel your pain on that one.
Hans:
But if you embed YouTube videos, don’t put recommended, like set the setting to not show recommended videos afterwards to avoid that mess.
Russel:
Note to self. As happily as I’m sure YouTube is to have that be a default setting.
Hans:
Yeah, no kidding.
Russel:
Make the change there.
