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Comment by MuffinFlavored | Hacker News Reader

> it's nice they are saying it's not enough.

Mullvad, who has a reputation in the HN comments for being just like... over the top amazing + great (they swear up and down they don't store traffic logs and if you don't trust them, you can pay anonymously somehow or whatever), is having a "hard time" being profitable/growing

all while

NordVPN, who has a bad reputation in HN comments for being untrustworthy and "not so anonymous", seems more well known (and therefore most likely has more paying customers and makes more money?)

What is that law called in business? when the "less good" offering wins?

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Where did you get this impression? Mullvad is growing like crazy (4 times as much revenue in 2021 compared to 2020, 2022 numbers not yet public). NordVPN is obviously larger since they are older and have bought a lot of ads on Youtube but Mullvad has crazy growth and I have seen their ads in the subway here in Stockholm. Mullvad is in no way a company which struggles as far as I can tell.

The old company: https://www.allabolag.se/5567839807/amagicom-ab

The current company: https://www.allabolag.se/5592384001/mullvad-vpn-ab

>> it's nice they are saying it's not enough.

> Mullvad [...] is having a "hard time" being profitable/growing

This is how I originally interpreted the parent comment as well, but they actually meant "a VPN is not enough to maintain your privacy, you also need a privacy-respecting browser."

It's because, like it or not, NordVPN is a great product. The apps are great, the design is slick, they have more servers in more countries, and offer additional value through things like Smart DNS, dedicated IP. Not to mention solid customer service.

Sure, their UX is more polished, and due to using residential IPs they aren't so easily blocked out.

But there is a different reason for the popularity:

NordVPN and others spend a lot of money on aggresive and pretty shady advertising, which tricks consumers into all kinds of false assumptions.

"Worse is better" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Not sure if it's got a "law," but the reasoning seems intuitive: 1. More complex products are usually better, but being more complicated means they're harder to explain to the average customer and makes them harder to sell. 2. More widely known products get that way by stripping money out of the budget for their product to put it into advertising instead. Less money in the product means it's potentially inferior to a product that put their whole budget into development.

It's called educating your potential customers on your product.

NordVPN has spent an incredible amount of money getting their name out there.

The majority of the population hasn't a clue about what a VPN is or does. The ones that do, their only interface is "its this thing my company makes me connect to"

Of the remaining subset of people who are aware of what VPNs actually do for you, it's likely they can only name 1 or two brands: NordVPN and ExpressVPN.

So if you have the superior product, but the lesser position in the market, then get busy marketing.

> So if you have the superior product, but the lesser position in the market, then get busy marketing.

Easier said than done I imagine. Big brand VPN providers charge several times more for the "same" service, or make you sign up with 3 year commitment to even come close to Mullvad's monthly pricing.

> NordVPN has spent an incredible amount of money getting their name out there.

I think you misspelled "spamming ads everywhere".

Whatever you want to call it, and whatever it means to you, it must be done in some way, like it or not. Or you can sit here and complain everyone's using the big name that sucks and nobody uses your superior 100% artisinally, crafted from free-range conflict-free code, ethically "superior" app.

This is dumb. Advertisement is a zero sum war. We'd all be better off if it didn't exist.

Well, many libertarians will state the rules of the free market as if they were physics law, but they are not. I think they're just post-fact invented laws to justify the ideology, but that's besides the point.

The law that "in a free market, the best product wins" has been beaten by profit-driven companies with billions at their disposal. Sure, you can have a better product. But maybe it's more profitable to have better marketing, or secondary sources of profit.

It's quite telling that VPN providers sponsor so many YouTube videos... Which require login to the biggest ad-driven company... Which will identify users by their login, no matter if they have a VPN or not!

> post-fact invented laws

Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations was published in 1776. I suppose you could say that was "post-fact" as it drew on what was happening at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the English and Scottish agricultural revolutions among other things, but "invented" would seem a bit of a stretch.

> The law that "in a free market, the best product wins" has been beaten by profit-driven companies with billions at their disposal.

Of course, given that law then the other possibility you appear to have dismissed is that the market is not free.

I must admit I don't know much about economics. I do get tired of people dismissing arguments with free market 101s - the world seems much more complex than that, and the big capitalists have become specialists at exploiting the market for their gains.

But then I'll day: maybe these guidelines are outdated, 250 years later. For example, does the best product win? Not if the product is complex enough and people cannot quickly measure its quality. There's 10$ crap and 100$ crap, and fake reviews, and paid reviews, and swapped products, and misleading marketing.

What's the best product? A good product will be generally be one that is:

- available

- at a price that the producer makes a profit

- at a price that the buyer can afford

- and does the job

Many such products may exist in a market, some "better" than others but that would be a subjective opinion. The problem with a non-free market e.g. one with monopolies or interference from governments in the form of subsidies, is that it interferes with the above list and you end up with inferior products (in terms of the above list) to those you would've had in a free market. Even the "producer makes a profit" part would be worse because there are less producers making profits, and thus fewer products, higher prices for those products remaining et cetera.

Advertising is not a bad thing in a free market. Fake reviews and the rest are, but they lead to less trust, as we see occur with Amazon, and you would go to a more trusted competitor but Amazon is a monopoly so…

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