This (rather public) intimate list stems from a blog post we made last month asking you to be a guest on our new podcast, in doing so we got the opportunity to speak to hundreds of business owners and founders about their experience(s) with messaging.
As a byproduct; and something we really didn’t expect, was the amount of interest people had about who we are? how we got started? how we’re financed? what we do to generate revenue? where we are based? etc. So in ‘speed dating’ format, here are 10 really intimate things you probably didn’t know about www.tawk.to :
1. We couldn’t be more multi-cultural or distributed if we tried
- Our HQ is in Las Vegas, USA – though we also have teams in Riga, Latvia and.. Davao / Manila, Philippines and.. London, UK and.. Sardinia, Italy and.. Geneva, Switzerland.
- Our Founder/CEO is originally from Australia, but is based in Italy.
- Our CTO is originally from Malaysia, but lives in Latvia.
- Between the entire team we represent 11 different nationalities !
2. We’re a family business
Tawk.to was founded by a husband and wife team. The first 2 employees (which are now co-founders) then joined the team and are now also married ♥ (we all think that they thought if they could get through the stresses of the first few years of a boot-strapped startup, then marriage would be a breeze).
3. Tawk.to is much more widely used than you might think
1.7 BILLION individuals see a www.tawk.to widget every month, that’s over half of the internet, and almost 1.8 Million business users have accounts globally, many of whom use www.tawk.to as their primary form of communication with customers.
According to datanyze and builtwith, there are 220 companies in the live chat market, and www.tawk.to accounts for over 15% of all websites that use a chat widget – it’s the web’s #1 or #2 (depends which site you track) most widely used chat application in the world.
4. We’re bootstrapped, 100% owned by the people that work here
Don’t let the numbers above fool you.. We’re not a large corporation, in-fact we are a completely self-funded (bootstrapped) startup, that has never taken on any outside funding.
When we got started, www.tawk.to’s founders decided to scrape together everything we had in our savings account to build and launch without any out-side funding. We are now 100% owned by the team that built and continue to work on www.tawk.to every day.
5. We keep the lights on with paid Add-ons
Tawk.to is and always will be 100% free to use so as long as you’re happy to keep the little ‘Powered by www.tawk.to’ link on the chat widget. If you would like to remove the branding (and support www.tawk.to’s ongoing development) you’re welcome to remove the branding (or add your own) for $12/month.
We also offer a Hired-Agent service, where you can hire our english speaking agents for $1/hr if you would like to use our chat agents to answer on behalf of your business. We’re also slowly rolling out more languages.
Our rates for add-ons are insanely cheap, and everyone pays the same rate – regardless of the size of your organization.
6. We’re turning 5 years old in October
Tawk.to was first launched at the PubCon conference in LasVegas in October, 2013 (though we commenced development in 2011)
7. We don’t do interviews, Press-releases or any Media
We’ve never released a press release; never done an interview and have never been showcased in any of the main-stream media. Our focus is on our customers, and our product.
8. We’re not interested in your Venture Capital
Tawk.to was launched at PubCon LasVegas in October, 2013.
9. We hate software that is
Tawk.to was launched at PubCon LasVegas in October, 2013.
10. We’re winning
Over the past 2 weeks we have come to realize how poorly we are doing when it comes to personalizing our story – which is a MAJOR FAIL for a company that is SO focused on making it easier and more personal for businesses to communicate with their customers. See, we spend every waking moment building software to humanize the visitor experience, we constantly strive for that WOW moment in the customer journey; yet our own ability as a company, to reach out and truly add that human persona to our communications.. well that has kinda been lost.
Pretty bizarre right, for a company with 24×7 HUMAN-powered support?
