How many of you remember this logo? It’s what I managed to whip up in Photoshop when Clicky launched a year ago today at clicky.roxr.net. It was only 6 weeks in the making at that point and rather scant for features, but one thing we did well from the beginning was showing you every visitor to your site and every action by said visitors. People loved that, and even today, there are still very few affordable products on the market that show you that level of detail per visitor. This remains one of our biggest selling points for a majority of people.
In one year’s time, we’ve had 20,000 sites register on getclicky.com, and tracked almost 600 million clicks for those sites. We’ve partnered with Performancing and FreeWebs to bring our product to their userbase of 40,000+ and 17,000,000+, respectively. (Plus one other company with over 150,000 users, but that has not launched yet so I can’t talk about it). We’ve had 4 buyout offers – 2 laughable, 2 reasonable – but we turned all of them down. Hard to believe there’s still only two of us running this thing. At this rate, that’s likely to change soon.
And what would be a year without controversy? We’ve had three big ones. First was when we announced pricing. We were open about this from the beginning (e.g. it was mentioned on the registration page that Clicky was “free while in beta”), but a lot of people were caught off guard and we got torn a new one. This was when people started saying “Google does the same thing for free”, which I still hear plenty today, and which still makes me extremely irritated every time.
(I love Google and their analytics product is really good – BUT, it is vastly different in functionality than Clicky and has a much different target market. Saying that they are the same except that one is free is completely inaccurate! Does Google Analytics have an API? RSS feeds? FeedBurner subscription data? Detailed visitor information? Widgets? Visitor labeling? Custom data tracking? Outbound link tracking? Download tracking? Tag Clouds? Real time data? In case you were wondering, the answer to all of those questions is NO! Likewise, Google’s product has some great features that we don’t, particularly with trend data and segmentation – but our upcoming release will address some of that!)
Second big controversy was when we were trying to pick a new logo. Here is our first logo, and here is the logo we ended up choosing (“choice 2” in the blog post, images are broken for some reason). We were dirt poor at the time and could only rely on our users to submit their entries in exchange for free premium service. I liked the new logo at the time but it started to feel too dark and evil after a while. That’s when we switched to our current look, that was in May or so.
And the last controversy was when we launched the new dashboard in July. (Check out screenshots of the old school dashboard: first one, second one). Most people absolutely loved it, but there were a few users who were extremely vocal about how much they hated it. That post had 90 comments – our most ever by far.
(I found a few other old screenshots too. Our original visitors page looked like this, but soon after changed into this, which is still quite similar to what it is today.)
So it’s been a year and we’re having a blast. But what about this new version of Clicky I’ve been yammering about recently? Unfortunately, it’s not ready yet. I was trying my damndest to have it ready by today for our one year anniversary, but alas, there was just too much to do. The launch is still several weeks away. The wait will be worth it though, trust me!
