Today I present another written interview with Davide De Guz who is the founder of ClickMeter.com. A quality service used as a real time link tracking service.
Check out the interview
1. What got you interested in creating a service that could help others track information through links? Share your story.
After I finished my studies (15 years ago) my first startup was University.it, a web portal for students.
We used to sell visibility as the business model. In that period I created the first prototipe of ClickMeter to certify the quality of our traffic for our customers.
Then I founded a web-marketing agency and we used ClickMeter internally to manage our customers campaigns and share results in real-time. Some of our customers wanted to use it for their own so I decided to create a public service. I just closed the agency as soon as the revenues from ClickMeter was much higher than the Agency ones.
2. When it comes to competition, there are so many services that provide link shortening and even offer tracking systems. What allows ClickMeter to stand out against everyone else?
We focus on quality: Technology + Usability. Since 2009 we re-builded the entire application four times from scratch. We constantly listen to our Customers and find out the way to do things better.
If you perform a search you will find that our redirecting and tracking service (as well as our interface) is one of the most copied from competitors.
3. How have you gone about promoting the service and you’re website? What’s working best? Social media, SEO, paid advertising, something else?
We have been through all of these (Social, SEO, Adwords, etc…) but the best traffic source in term of conversions volume is by far the word of mouth.
We have currently more than 50,000 customers (free and paid) and we count to double it in next 12 months.
4. What have been your biggest challenges in terms of growing ClickMeter to where it is today?
Finding the right team was surely the biggest challenge. We recently hired two super-smart engineers and they will indeed be the difference in next future.
5. What are your future plans for 2014 and beyond?
We are going to publish (beta) the new system architecture. This is a way to get extremely precise reports, scalable and fast performances. New platform will also include a new API version that will allow everyone to integrate marketing analytics in his app. After that we will start integrating with many services as WordPress, MailChimp, SalesForce and so on. We will also add some incredible features (especially in the share and conversion arena). Our mission is to become the easiest, most powerful and trusted service to manage marketing links.