Marc von Brockdorff

Throughout the past few years, I have had the pleasure of working with extremely talented individuals on a number of tech startups. I love the process of taking an idea and turning it into a product that users are actually happy to pay for - it's incredibly rewarding to see that happen. But there is one part of that process that I find extremely frustrating: choosing the right pricing structure for your startup.

We’re extremely ambitious - our goal is to have Hotjar installed on 10 million sites. Having such a bold vision whilst taking a freemium approach presents huge technical challenges. How does an engineering team build a platform that can handle hundreds of millions of requests per day knowing that the majority of that traffic is coming from free users? Early on, we knew the key was to do things differently and focus on building a platform that can scale.

Your startup's homepage or landing page may be the one most important page of your site. Think of it as an empty canvas which you, as a business owner or web designer, can use to engage your first-time visitors. Primarily, your homepage's job is to explain what your product or service is all about. But of course, it needs to do much more. It needs to provide your visitors with re-assurance that you are trustworthy, reliable and real. It needs to tell your visitor where to go next. It needs to provide enough information to keep your visitors from pressing the back button. And it needs to do all this in as little time as possible.

Unfortunately, there's no magic formula to building the perfect homepage. There are, however, a number of elements that most startups seem to use repeatedly on their homepages to convert first time visitors into customers. To help me get closer to understanding what makes a homepage work, I decided to analyse the homepages of the top startups. The aim of the research was to establish a set of ideas which can be tested on any homepage.

At Hotjar, we firmly believe that the user always comes first. Online startups can no longer get away with offering a mediocre product or a sub-par customer experience. Users expect a great user experience and responsive, quick customer support and the companies that will succeed are those who can provide exactly that.

Fog Creek Software, the makers of Trello, recently announced that their incredibly simple collaboration tool recently hit over 4 million users. Considering Trello was released just under 3 years ago, one thing is clear: The majority of users love simple, intuitive tools that purposely limit the functionality of their tools to avoid unnecessary bloating and complexity.

If you currently use Trello, there is one way you can quickly double your efficiency: shortcuts. Below, we're highlighting the top 8 shortcuts you should definitely learn today to plan your projects and collaborate more efficiently.

I’m Marc von Brockdorff ,  co-founder and Director of Engineering at Hotjar. I have been building online products for the past 15 years and now spend most of my days planning the Hotjar product roadmap, interviewing candidates, and helping our product teams. In 2018 we reached a big milestone :  €15,000,000 in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), around three years after launching publicly in April 2015. Here are some things I learned throughout the process.