Hush’s Two-Sided Value Proposition: How They Turned Employee Privacy into Enterprise Security

The hardest part of selling enterprise software isn’t convincing the buyer – it’s getting employees to actually use it. This challenge becomes particularly acute in security, where user adoption can make or break the entire solution.

In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Mykolas Rambus, founder of privacy company Hush, revealed how they’ve achieved remarkable adoption by flipping the traditional enterprise security model on its head.

Finding the Double Win

Most security tools create friction between company needs and employee preferences. Hush took a different approach. “We talk about the carrot and the carrot, if you will,” Mykolas explains. “Yes, this benefits the company, but the most likely risk that an employee is going to face is identity theft.”

This dual-benefit framing fundamentally changes the adoption dynamic. Instead of another corporate mandate, Hush positions itself as a personal benefit that happens to serve enterprise goals.

Overcoming Initiative Fatigue

Hush recognized a core truth about enterprise rollouts: “The last thing employees want is yet another thing pushed down from IT that they’ve got to deal with. Everyone’s sick of that,” Mykolas notes.

Their solution? Minimize the ask. “We require very little information when they onboard,” Mykolas explains. “It’s antithetical to say, well, what’s your date of birth? What’s your address? Just give us some fragments and we’ll do what the bad guys do and find your digital footprint.”

Making Privacy Personal

The key to Hush’s approach is showing employees their own vulnerability. “This is where it gets interesting, where they’ve probably never seen that in black and white,” Mykolas shares. “Maybe they’ve googled themselves and gone to page one or two, but they’ve never gone to page eleven or beyond, which is what we do.”

This personal revelation creates immediate engagement: “Here’s your entire digital life, by the way. Here are your vulnerabilities. Did you recognize that? Here are the top 50 answers to bank challenge questions. And you’ve got ten of those out there on the Internet about yourself.”

Building for Both Sides

The company’s two-sided approach extends to how they measure success. While they track traditional enterprise metrics, their 92 NPS score – which Mykolas notes is “shockingly high” considering “Apple in the seventies” – suggests they’re delivering real value to individual users.

This high user satisfaction creates a virtuous cycle. Happy employees become internal advocates, leading to organic expansion within organizations. “When things go sideways, when a leader is threatened, when they’ve had an incident, that’s when they message one another,” Mykolas explains.

The Future of Enterprise Privacy

Hush’s approach points to a broader shift in enterprise software – the growing importance of serving both organizational and individual needs. As Mykolas puts it, their goal is to make it “a reasonable expectation for any American to know that when someone drives down the street and types in their address, types in a address, they won’t be able to figure out who lives there, all about them, in two minutes flat.”

For founders building enterprise solutions, Hush’s success offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the best way to serve the enterprise is to start by serving the individual.