Louis Grenier

David Darmanin, one of Hotjar’s founders, launched two startups before Hotjar took off—but both companies crashed and burned. Each time, he and his team spent months trying to design an amazing new product and user experience, but they failed because they didn’t have a clear understanding of what the market demanded.

Developing an accurate picture of your customers doesn’t need to cost you large amounts of money and effort.

There’s a time and a place for specialized tools, in-depth interviews, and complex datasets; but you can also do a lot with little—and asking your customers direct questions will give you a clear idea of who they are, so you can improve your website experience for them.

Scott Adams, the creator of the Dilbert comic strip, has spent the past 30 years making fun of inefficiency in business—including our efforts to reduce inefficiency.

When I started my career in sales, I found myself surrounded by people who were always obsessed with something: competitors, market trends, industry best practices. Some would keep constant track of who else was selling what, and how much of it; others would go to great lengths to steal clients from the competition.

We’d have weekly meetings where I would report on sales, and every single time we’d just look at these numbers going up and down on a spreadsheet. At one point, the marketing goal for the entire year was to get more fans on Facebook than one of our direct competitors.

Here’s one prediction that has a 100% chance of coming true: throughout 2019 and 2020, a bunch of blogs will philosophize about ‘the future of work’ and what it means for humanity. Some will predict a workplace utopia, while others will paint a picture of doom, gloom, and job-killing robots.

To keep things interesting, we’ve chosen a different angle. Instead of exploring what the future of work might look like and labeling it good or bad, my colleagues and I have asked some innovative companies what they’re doing right now that’s ahead of its time.

The result? Practical, actionable advice to help you (and your company) succeed in the decades to come.

Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep! That's the sound of your alarm going off. Beeeeeep! Beeeeeep!

Oh come on, one more minute! I need to sleep a bit more... I really don't want to go to work...

Have you ever felt this way before? Most certainly. There are always days when it's tougher to wake up than others.

Let me ask you another question: have you ever felt like this day after day?

Some Hotjar team members did, for months and even years, because they weren’t in the career of their dreams. The good news is that they managed to turn their careers around thanks to sheer persistence, tough decisions, and individual introspection.

These are their stories.

I was hired by Hotjar last year to lead content, which I thought meant the blog, but it didn’t. Our CEO, David Darmanin, had a much wider scope in mind. It just took me a while to figure that out.

Once I did, the idea to launch a podcast began to evolve (the evolution of which we’ll cover in our next post, because it’s an interesting story of trial, error, and a picture of a light-saber wielding Rand Fishkin).

And now, we are launching 'The Humans Strike Back' as a podcast, and a website, and a community about helping each other succeed as individuals, as employees, and as business owners by putting people first.

Rand Fishkin found success by transforming his mother’s small business marketing firm into a $45M+ marketing software company. Over the course of 11 years, he helped to design and launch a multitude of software products and made his fair share of mistakes.

Lucky for you, Rand is an open book.

Here are four lessons he learned building a $45M software company, based on a conversation we had with Rand Fishkin on Hotjar’s podcast 'The Humans Strike Back'.

Open-ended questions are great for getting authentic feedback because they give people a chance to describe what they’re experiencing in their own voice.

On average, for every 100$ of Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) being newly generated on a given day, $32 is lost one year after (which means we’re left with $68 of MRR).

Our revenue churn is therefore 32% - almost a third of our revenue - after one year, which means that our revenue retention is 68%.

Thankfully, we cover our churn losses by generating new revenue from new Hotjar customers.

But revenue churn is a parasite slowly eating us from the inside. We need to kill it now before it grows too big.

How can a company that specializes in conversion fail a launch so badly they almost have to let an entire team go?

More importantly, how did this company, ConversionXL, turn the six-month-long failure of their CXL Institute into a massive success using customer insights?

Peep Laja, the founder of CXL, sat down to walk us through the answers to these questions.

This is a case study about what to do when your big plans fall through, when your launch fails, when you feel out of step with what your customers actually need, and how to use customer insights to put you back on the right track.

The day may come when you feel you’ve hit a wall with your business. Your products are great, and you have an amazing team of talented professionals working with you, but still, you can't seem to grow past your current revenue numbers.

Could it be that you haven't given the customer experience enough attention?

One of the best ways to measure your success in this area is to track Net Promoter Score (NPS®). NPS is a crucial business metric that Taylor & Hart, the award-winning jeweler featured in this case study, uses religiously: it's helped them secure repeat business, expand their product offerings, and grow at an impressive pace.

We recently sat down with Stefan Milev, the company’s CMO, to discuss how Taylor & Hart has grown so quickly by using the NPS metric and obsessing (in a good way!) over the customer experience.

In this post, I want to let you in on the entire process that went into developing ‘The Humans Strike Back’ by Hotjar; a podcast, a website, and a community about helping each other succeed as individuals, as employees, and as business owners by putting people first.

It’s been a winding road, but hopefully, in seeing how this idea developed, you’ll gain insight into how to create your own purpose-driven marketing campaign that not only shines a spotlight on your company, but makes the world a better place for humans to live. Some of this may sound familiar, if you’ve signed up for our emails, but here I go into even greater depth and share the whole story of our journey to get back to being human.

What changes can we make that will have the most positive impact on our users and customers? Why are some of them leaving and never coming back?

These are two very important questions Hotjar needs to answer to continue to grow, and in order to answer them, we need user feedback.

One way to collect it is to ask the Net Promoter Score® (NPS) question:

“How likely are you to recommend Hotjar to a friend or colleague?” on a scale of zero to 10 (with 10 being extremely likely).

It was my first job in digital marketing and I wanted to make an impression as quickly as possible.

I was working for a SaaS company in Dublin and one of my objectives was to increase the conversion rate from visitors to paid customers.

I really had no clue where to start.

I remember looking at the websites of major SaaS companies to get some ideas: Mailchimp, SalesForce, Zendesk...

Zendesk's registration form caught my eye. They only had two fields: "First Name" and "Email".

We had eight.

I remember searching for articles mentioning best practices on how to increase form conversions and found plenty. The vast majority had “Reduce the number of fields” as the first item in their list.

In the world of marketing, there is no shortage of approaches and strategies.

One such method is called customer-centric marketing. We were fortunate enough to interview Bill Macaitis, a marketing leader who served Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack, about this approach, and learn exactly how customer-centric marketing has helped him—and can help you—grow these companies.

Mobile conversions are notoriously lower than desktop ones. And if you’ve hit a plateau and are struggling to increase conversion rate, don’t give up!

Time4Sleep is an e-commerce company that was in that very position just two years ago—but they eventually increased mobile conversions by 63% for one of their biggest product categories.

How did they do it? By tossing so-called ‘best practices’ aside and obsessing over their users. I talked to their Senior UX & CRO Analyst Gintare Gervyte about their mobile conversion optimization, and here’s what I learned.

Whether you’ve just launched a new product that isn’t selling as much as expected or you’re wanting to sell even more of one that’s already doing great, here’s one thing you should try: survey your customers to get some insight about what’s working and what needs improving.

I don’t mean ‘spend thousands of dollars on customer panels’ or ‘research an industry-defining report on customer expectations’: I mean take 30 literal minutes out of your day to get on a call with an existing customer, or create a quick survey and email it to people who have already bought one (or more) of your products.

In this piece, we take you through 5 of the best questions to ask your customers about the products and services you’re selling. To pick them, I spoke to two business leaders, Brian Dean (founder of Backlinko) and Sarah Doody (author of UX Notebook), who experienced a few snafus in their business and bounced back by reaching out to the only people who could help them figure out what to do: their existing customers.

When you set out to improve conversion rates, where do you focus your attention? Do you obsess over the visitors who leave your website without buying?

Hotjar Founder and CEO David Darmanin made that mistake for years—but when he switched his focus and started looking at the users who did convert, he saw real results.

What do you do when your website is not converting, your product is not working, and people are leaving you? How do you find out what’s wrong—so you can fix it?