
Olark – The First Three Years - fernandotakai
https://www.olark.com/customers/olark-the-first-three-years
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jkaljundi
Interesting. Thanks for sharing. Being a serial entrepreneur I can attest that
in multiple companies of mine raising the prices has been the best decision
we've done, often taking us to profitability. It sounds scary at first, you
worry about the value to customers. In reality what often happens is you are
being started taken more seriously by customers. Often both deal size and
number of deals per month increase - while we all worry that the deal number
initially goes down. Most founders should try charging more than they
currently do, especially if the initial prices have been taken from thin air.

In Europe I also see more and more teams who thanks to 3-5 times lower cost
base than in Silicon Valley happily become profitable and growing from their
own cost base. Reach $20k in monthly revenue and a team of 5-10 good people
can enjoy their life as kings and queens. Grow $1-2k per month and hire one
additional person each month. No investment needed if you don't want to
accelerate.

Have followed both rules with my current startup Weekdone
([https://weekdone.com/](https://weekdone.com/)) and we're nicely profitable
here in Estonia, growing month by month. Raising funding is a potential for
upside, but not really needed.

~~~
simonswords82
Your post is timely. We're based in the UK and constantly being approached for
investment and I just can't seem to bring myself to jump on that ride.

While £20k MRR won't allow us to pay for 5 - 10 people here in the UK, £50k
MRR will and at any point I can make the call to sell the company.

By the way we're in a similar space, I run
[http://www.staffsquared.com](http://www.staffsquared.com) (HR software).

We also see our competitors dropping their prices, but my take is the same as
yours, we tell our customers that we won't compete on price as our app is
simply better than the competition :)

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pbreit
A nice story but gotta say that olark tab that keeps rising up from the bottom
on every single page drives me absolutely nuts.

~~~
bcx
Assuming the tab is going to be there, what would make it be less distracting
to you? When we first started all this we wanted to get rid of those
incredibly annoying people wearing headsets bouncing around the screen. (I
think we've made progress).

(Some themes are animated others aren't, perhaps if we had more people use non
animated themes by default, it'd help)

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grey-area
If you must have a tab, it should have a big dismiss button for the 90% of
visitors who are not interested. Why is there no option to close it?

Another option would be not to have a tab at all (a hovering tab is very
annoying as it hides content and distracts from the site for a function which
is not often used) - instead let customers include an unobtrusive help button
in their actual page content wherever they wish which calls your js in order
to display your overlay when clicked. You don't need an obnoxious tab.

~~~
bcx
Site owners actually have the option to make it close able, and implement with
just a simple "help" button.

I think what generally happens is that the team that handles customer
communication does not have the dev resources to get someone to add UI
elements to their page, so only bigger companies take advantage of "closeable
olark" and click to open the chat window.

We also found that once people close the window, many get confused and have a
hard time opening it again. (clearly not a problem for the "average HN
reader", who might clear cookies and reload)

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wamatt
Thanks for sharing, really interesting approach.

BTW, Olark is a great product, and you deserve every bit of success!

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bcx
It is interesting how much pricing can really help drive revenue :-). It's
really hard to know what works without experiments.

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martokus
Good job, keep it up!

I'm a paying customer for more than 6 months now and love the product.

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curiously
Great article. Btw, I wonder why we see so many blogs from SaaS companies
revolve around the business side of things. For example Groove does the same
thing on it's blog, go into how to run a successful business.

On another note, I've unfortunately stopped using Olark for a completely free
service called [https://tawk.to](https://tawk.to). It even came with an
Android app, and I just couldn't believe that it was completely free. It was
enough for me to completely ditch Olark (even though it was well made),
because it was free.

~~~
dylanz
Very interesting. How do they make money? The product looks very robust, but
when I see nice products like this that charge no money, I wonder how they
stay alive. At least disclose how they pay their employees? Are they a
consultancy? Are they funded? Private or public?

~~~
grimmfang
They offer a service where they man your support for you.

~~~
curiously
seemed like they provided this service to large companies to support the rest
of us for free.

I would definitely pay for something extra. Even the UI is top notch. I was so
impressed.

