Did David Darmanin’s wife think “Third time lucky!” when he woke her up in the middle of the night to tell her about the great idea he had had?
He had already started two companies which he had had to give up on but he is the ultimate entrepreneur, ready to take risks and to learn from his experiences. Speaking to him at the borrowed offices in Sliema he and his team have been using, it is clear he is himself still somewhat stunned at just what a great idea it turned out to be.
His entrepreneurial spirit was nourished by Young Enterprise, which his team went on to win at European level, and he even started an entrepreneurship foundation while studying. He graduated as a lawyer but it was not a good fit, and he went to work for a software company helping to analyse the site and its traffic and realised that he was becoming intrigued by what made some sites work better than others.
“There were tools to help website owners but they were very expensive and very disjointed. And the clients were obviously not happy as they knew they were not getting the information they needed.
“It was the perfect time for us to disrupt!” he said.
In June 2014, he and three other Maltese, and two Swedes got together to create Hotjar (there is now another person in Finland, as well as contractors ‘all over the place’).
The idea was to offer one tool costing $29 a month, a fraction of the thousands such tools normally cost: “We wanted to democratise it, by going for low price, high volume.”
The founders put in their own money, knowing that they would have to pay themselves till it got off the ground – and immediately set out to make their mark. Rather than developing the product, they first focused on enlisting clients. Within a month, they put up a website explaining what the service would do and asking for e-mails, promising benefits like free subscriptions for those who referred them to friends. The strategy worked better than they could possibly have hoped: they accumulated a database of over 60,000 e-mails. Work started on the website, and by September 2014, a beta test version was up and running. By March this year, clients in over 100 countries were using it to analyse almost 23,000 sites.
It was time to launch Hotjar officially, offering heat maps showing where visitors lingered most, recordings of visitors’ movement through the site, feedback showing where visitors were getting stuck and frustrated and various other services.
“We work out what drives traffic to the site, what hooks visitors, and what barriers there are. And we offer loads of tips on how to improve it, the ‘Hotjar’ way,” he grinned.
Their innovative marketing approach has not changed. At the moment, they are offering a free basic package with the chance to upgrade to a premium product. Within weeks, Hotjar will be moving into its new offices in St Julian’s – a few sofas, table soccer, fridges, no formal desks, no formal working hours or leave – and Dr Darmanin will sit down to adjust their strategy.
“I guess you could say we are a success. Six weeks after going live, we are already breaking even and we are now aggressively recruiting a few of the best and brightest around the world.
“We are on track for a turnover of €500,000 a year and we have already been approached by an investor but I don’t want to sell out. We want to go for the US market and will need to grow but we want a strategic investor, not a buyer.”
Hotjar now has 29,000 subscribers, who use Hotjar to monitor 37,000 websites. He should be very happy but it will come as no surprise to know he is far from satisfied.
“We want everyone in the world to use this tool so that we can change the way websites work,” he said.
From anyone else, this might sound cocky. But as Dr Darmanin’s wife turned over to go back to sleep a year ago, did she ever imagine the idea would fly so high?