Privacy Policy

1. Introduction

StartBlox, Inc. ("Company," "we," "us," or "StartBlox") respects your privacy and is committed to protecting it through our compliance with this policy.

This policy describes the types of information we may collect from you, or that you may provide, when you use startblox.com and the StartBlox Platform (together, the "Website," as defined in our Terms of Use), and our practices for collecting, using, maintaining, protecting, and disclosing that information. This policy is incorporated into, and should be read together with, our Terms of Use and our Subscription Agreement.

This policy applies to information we collect on the Website, in email and other electronic messages between you and StartBlox, and when you interact with our advertising or content on third-party sites, if that content links to this policy. It does not apply to information collected by any third party, including a Recommended Vendor you visit after clicking a link from the Website — that is governed by that third party's own privacy policy.

By accessing or using the Website, you agree to this Privacy Policy. If you do not agree with our practices, your choice is not to use the Website. We may change this policy from time to time (see Section 14); your continued use of the Website after a change takes effect means you accept that change.

2. Children's Privacy

Our Website is not directed to children under 13, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a child under 13. Consistent with our Terms of Use, a person under 18 may only use the Platform as a Workspace Member under a parent or legal guardian's Account, and we do not knowingly collect personal information directly from a minor independent of that supervising adult's Account. If we learn we have collected personal information from a child under 13 without the involvement of a parent or guardian's Account, we will delete that information. If you believe we might have such information, contact us at hello@startblox.com.

3. Information We Collect

(a) Information You Provide to Us

• Account information: your name, email address, profile photo (if you upload one), and password (if you use email/password sign-in rather than a magic link).
• Business and diagnostic profile information: your business name and logo; your industry (primary and any secondary industries); your business's stage and milestones; and profile fields you answer during intake, including your business's location — country, state/province, and city (city is entered as free text) — founder count, funding status, customer type, business presence, and other industry-specific fields.
• Diagnostic answers and content: your answers to diagnostic questions, and any related notes or selections you make while working through the Platform's action plan (for example, marking an action as started, complete, or dismissed).
• AI Advisor interactions: questions you submit to the AI Advisor, and any thumbs-up/thumbs-down feedback or optional written comment you leave on AI Advisor or Platform content. We do not currently retain a transcript or history of your AI Advisor conversations after a response is generated (see Section 5(c)).
• Team and portfolio information: if you invite another person to a Business (as an advisor or team member) or accept an invitation yourself, we collect the relevant email address, invited role, and invitation status.
• Billing information: your selected Subscription Plan and billing cycle. Your payment card or bank details are collected and stored by our payment processor, not by StartBlox directly — we retain only a reference ID and status information (for example, trial end date, renewal date, and payment status).
• Communications: records and copies of correspondence if you contact us, and your responses to any survey we ask you to complete.
• Pre-signup marketing information: if you provide your email address to receive updates before creating an Account (for example, through a marketing page), we collect that email address and how you found us.

(b) Information We Collect Automatically

As you use the Website, we and our analytics provider automatically collect certain information about your equipment, browsing actions, and usage patterns, including:

• Pages and features you visit or use, and actions you take within the Platform (for example, completing an intake step, viewing a Focus, or clicking a Recommended Vendor link).
• Automatic interaction data — clicks, taps, form interactions, and frustration signals such as rapidly repeated clicks — captured by our analytics provider to help us understand how features are used. We do not capture the contents you type into form fields as part of this automatic collection.
• Error and crash diagnostics, including limited technical context such as the page where an error occurred, used to detect and fix problems.
• Your general industry and location (as provided in your profile), associated with this usage information.
• Device and connection information, including IP address (from which we may derive your general, city-level location), browser type, and operating system.
• Standard web log data (timestamps, referring/exit pages, and similar technical data).

We use session replay, provided by our analytics provider (PostHog), to record how you interact with our pages — such as mouse movement, clicks, scrolling, and navigation — so we can diagnose problems and improve usability. These recordings are configured to mask the information you enter and, by default, the text shown on your screen, in order to limit the personal and business information captured; passwords are always masked. Depending on our recording configuration, some information visible on your screen may still be captured. Our analytics provider (PostHog) processes this automatically-collected usage information, including these recordings, in the United States.

This usage information is tied to your Account internally (it is pseudonymous, not anonymous, in our systems) so we can operate and improve the Platform, including compiling it — together with your diagnostic answers and profile information — into the Aggregated Statistics described in our Subscription Agreement. When we disclose or use Aggregated Statistics outside of operating your own Account (for example, for benchmarking or product-improvement purposes), it is in de-identified, aggregate form that does not identify you or your Business. See Section 4.

(c) Information We Collect from Third Parties

If you sign in using a third-party identity provider, we receive the information that provider shares with us as part of that sign-in (typically your name and email address). Our payment processor shares subscription and payment status information with us (not full card or bank account numbers). If you're invited to a Business by another Subscriber, we receive the email address and role information that Subscriber provides about you.

4. Aggregated Statistics

"Aggregated Statistics" has the meaning given in our Subscription Agreement: data about your use of the Platform — including diagnostic answers, industry, general location, and in-app actions — that we compile in an aggregate and de-identified manner to produce statistical and performance information about the Platform, and to improve it for you and others. StartBlox owns Aggregated Statistics outright once compiled. We do not disclose Aggregated Statistics in a form that identifies you or your Business, and we do not attempt to re-identify individuals from Aggregated Statistics we've compiled or received.

5. How We Use Your Information

We use the information described in Section 3, including personal information, to:

• Provide, operate, and personalize the Platform, including generating your diagnostic scores, action plan, and AI Advisor responses.
• Process transactions, send billing notices, and enforce our agreements with you.
• Send you service communications (for example, account, subscription, or security notices) and, if you've opted in, marketing communications.
• Compile Aggregated Statistics as described in Section 4.
• Maintain the security and integrity of the Platform, including detecting and preventing fraud or misuse.
• Comply with legal obligations and enforce our Terms of Use and Subscription Agreement.
• With your consent, or for any other purpose we disclose to you at the time you provide information.

(a) AI Advisor Processing

When you submit a question to the AI Advisor, relevant profile and diagnostic information is sent to our AI model provider, Google (Gemini), solely to generate a response to you. We do not permit Google to use this data to train its general-purpose foundation models. See Section 2(g) of our Subscription Agreement for the related contractual terms.

(b) Marketing Communications

If you provide your email for updates, or opt in during signup, we may send you marketing communications. You can opt out at any time using the unsubscribe link in those emails, or by emailing hello@startblox.com. This does not affect service communications necessary to operate your Account or Subscription.

(c) AI Advisor Retention

We do not currently store a transcript of your AI Advisor conversations. We do retain the fact that you interacted with the AI Advisor (as part of general usage information under Section 3(b)) and any explicit feedback you leave. If this changes — for example, if we begin retaining conversation history to improve the feature — we will update this policy.

6. How We Share Your Information

We do not sell your personal information for money. We may share it as follows:

• Service providers who process it on our behalf, under contractual confidentiality and use restrictions (including data processing agreements where applicable), including: our database and hosting providers (Neon, Vercel), our payment processor (Zoho), our AI model provider (Google), our transactional email provider (Resend), and our product analytics provider (PostHog). These providers act as our processors and are not permitted to use your information for their own purposes.
• Recommended Vendors, when you click a vendor link from your action plan. That link includes a UTM tracking code, and in some cases your general location and/or industry as additional link parameters, so StartBlox can be credited for the referral; we do not include your name, email, or other directly identifying Subscriber Data in that link. Any information you then choose to provide directly to that vendor's own site is governed by their privacy policy, not this one.
• Workspace Members on your Business, consistent with the roles and access described in Section 3(b) of our Subscription Agreement — for example, an Advisor you invite can see the Subscriber Data on that Business.
• In a business transfer, such as a merger, acquisition, or sale of assets, subject to standard confidentiality expectations.
• To comply with law, such as a court order, subpoena, or governmental request, or to protect the rights, property, or safety of StartBlox, our Subscribers, or others.
• With your consent, or to fulfill a purpose you've directed (for example, if you use a feature that shares specific content with a third party).

7. Cookies and Similar Technologies

We and our service providers use cookies, browser local storage, and similar technologies for the following purposes:

• Strictly necessary — to keep you signed in and maintain the security of your session. The Website will not function properly without these.
• Preferences — to remember your interface choices, such as your theme and sidebar state.
• Analytics — to understand how the Platform is used, via our analytics provider (PostHog). PostHog sets cookies and stores identifiers in your browser's local storage to measure usage as described in Section 3(b). These identifiers are pseudonymous and are not used for advertising.

You can set your browser to refuse some or all cookies, or to alert you when cookies are being sent; if you disable cookies, some parts of the Website may not function properly. We honor the Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signal: if your browser sends a GPC signal, we treat it as a request to opt out of analytics and, where applicable, of any "sharing" as described in Sections 11 and 12. We do not currently use third-party advertising cookies on the Website, and our use of analytics cookies is not a "sale" of your personal information.

8. Data Retention; Account Deletion

We retain your Subscriber Data for as long as your Account is active, and afterward as needed to comply with our legal obligations, resolve disputes, and enforce our agreements. You can clear your diagnostic and Business data using the account reset feature in Settings, which requires typed confirmation before proceeding, consistent with Section 10(b) of our Subscription Agreement. Usage information collected automatically (Section 3(b)) is retained by our analytics provider for a limited period in accordance with our configured retention settings, after which it is deleted or retained only in de-identified, aggregated form. Aggregated Statistics, once compiled, are retained in de-identified form and are not deleted along with your Account, since they no longer identify you.

9. Data Security

We use measures designed to protect your personal information from accidental loss and from unauthorized access, use, alteration, and disclosure, including encryption of data in transit. No method of transmission over the internet, or method of electronic storage, is completely secure, and we cannot guarantee absolute security. You're responsible for keeping your account password confidential and for using a strong, unique password.

10. Your Choices and Rights

You can review and update most of your account and profile information directly in the Platform's Settings. You can also email hello@startblox.com to request access to, correction of, or deletion of personal information you've provided to us; we may not be able to accommodate a request that would violate a legal obligation or make information incorrect. Deleting your personal information generally requires deleting your Account, as described in Section 8.

11. California Privacy Rights

The California Consumer Privacy Act, as amended by the California Privacy Rights Act (together, "CCPA"), applies to businesses that meet certain size thresholds (based on annual revenue and the volume of California consumers' personal information processed). StartBlox does not currently meet those thresholds. As a matter of policy, and so these rights are already in place if that changes, we extend the following choices to California residents now:

• Right to know what personal information we've collected, used, disclosed, and (if applicable) sold or shared about you, including the categories of sources, purposes, and third-party recipients.
• Right to delete personal information we've collected from you, subject to certain exceptions (for example, information we need to complete a transaction or comply with a legal obligation).
• Right to correct inaccurate personal information we maintain about you.
• Right to opt out of sale or sharing. We do not sell personal information for money. As described in Section 6, when you click a Recommended Vendor link we include a UTM tracking code and, in some cases, your general location and/or industry as link parameters, so we can be credited for the referral; to the extent California law would consider that "sharing" for cross-context behavioral advertising purposes, you may opt out by emailing hello@startblox.com with the subject line "California Opt-Out" — we will stop including location/industry parameters in your referral links (the UTM code itself, which does not contain personal information, is not affected). We also honor the Global Privacy Control (GPC) browser signal as a valid request to opt out of any such "sharing" and of analytics.
• Right to limit use of sensitive personal information. We collect limited sensitive personal information (such as precise-enough location at the city level); we use it only to operate and improve the Platform, not to infer characteristics about you for advertising, so no additional action is needed to limit this use beyond what's described in this policy.
• Right to non-discrimination for exercising any of these rights — we will not deny you services, charge different prices, or provide a different level of service because you exercised a choice described in this section.
• Right to designate an authorized agent to make a request on your behalf; we may require proof of that authorization and verification of your identity.

To exercise any of these rights, contact us at hello@startblox.com. We will verify your identity before responding, typically using the information already associated with your Account.

12. Other US State Privacy Rights

Residents of certain other US states with comprehensive privacy laws (for example, Virginia, Colorado, Connecticut, and Utah) may have similar rights to know, access, correct, delete, and opt out of certain uses of their personal information. If you are located in one of these states, you may exercise these rights by contacting us at hello@startblox.com, and we will respond consistent with the law applicable to you.

13. International Users

Consistent with our Terms of Use and Subscription Agreement, the Website is currently available to users in the United States and the other countries listed at signup, and is not currently available to users in the European Union or the United Kingdom. If that changes, we will update this policy to describe the additional rights and safeguards that apply.

14. Changes to This Privacy Policy

We may revise this Privacy Policy from time to time in our sole discretion. All changes are effective immediately when we post them and apply to all access to and use of the Website thereafter. Where a change is material and you hold an active paid Subscription, we will make commercially reasonable efforts to also notify you directly before the change takes effect. Your continued use of the Website after a revised policy is posted means you accept the change.

15. Precedence

In the event of any inconsistency between this Privacy Policy and any other document referenced or incorporated herein, the following order of precedence governs: (i) first, the Subscription Agreement; (ii) second, the Terms of Use; and (iii) third, this Privacy Policy.

16. Contact Information

To ask questions or raise concerns about this Privacy Policy or our privacy practices, including to exercise any of the rights described above, contact us at:

StartBlox, Inc., 470 W Broad St #17, Columbus, OH 43215 hello@startblox.com