Olark – The First Three Years | Hacker News Reader

Olark – The First Three Years

olark.com

81 pointsfernandotakai22 comments

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/) and we're nicely profitable here in Estonia, growing month by month. Raising funding is a potential for upside, but not really needed.

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 (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 :)

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

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)

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.

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)

One of the most annoying thing is the number of other requests Olark makes on a page. Or that you can't just hide it away permanently/30 days whatever because I'm not going to be using it on this site.

Let's say we wanted to give power users a way to hide the chat window, and have it come back when they wanted?

How would you want it to work? (i.e. we could do like, if query string contains hide-olark-for-30-days, we could just hide it for you, and if you wanted it back, we could give you an API command you could type into dev tools?

Our biggest concern (and we do allow hide-able chat boxes, is that once it's gone, many visitors actually want it back in the future on unpredictable intervals. So you can't just simple say "hide for 30 days")

How about sliding up once on the first page visited and then on subsequent pages just have it display. It's the sliding up on every single page that is so distracting (perhaps that's the intent).

This also drives me crazy. I find it terribly distracting. I wanted to integrate Olark into my saas app in the past, but, if I'm not mistaken, it seems that the tab widget is the only way to go. This was a non starter for me as it would obscure part of my UI.

It looks like you can load Olark into any DOM element[0] now - perhaps that'd help?

[0] https://www.olark.com/api#box.inline

Thanks for sharing, really interesting approach.

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

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

Good job, keep it up!

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

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. 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.

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?

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

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.

most likely funded, but I find it as a serious threat to Olark's business because there's absolutely nothing Tawk can't do that Olark does from my experience so far.

I think Tawk does a pretty good job of handling the basics. Most of our customers operating at any scale end up integrating Olark with a CRM such as Salesforce or a Helpdesk solution. We also have excellent cobrowsing, and a there's also a lot you can do with our api, http://www.olark.com/api.

It's also important to remember they will need to monetize eventually.

they are already monetizing, just not for the software. Olark is great, but I am sorry to say their app kills Olark..and their new dashboard is feature packed

Just curious, what other topics would you like to see SaaS companies tackle? We're always open to exploring new trends if there's something you'd find more useful/helpful :)

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