Interview with Clicky Founder, Sean Hammons

Clicky is one of the analytics tools used on CenterNetworks. I love the Spy feature which allows you to watch your traffic live. Today they launched a new dashboard which is basically the home page for your stats and displays a variety of reports at a glance. The app is very well done from both a usability and content standpoint. I asked Founder Sean Hammons to participate in an interview so we can all learn about his tool and his tips for your startup. Check out the transcript below. Also check out our previous Clicky coverage.

Allen: Can you provide a brief background about yourself?

Sean: I've had a high interest in computers since I was young (currently 29), and have taught myself most of what I know. I don't have any formal training or a degree in my field. I graduated from Oregon State with a Bachelor's in Psychology of all topics. I started fooling around with making web pages in 1999, and have been employed in this field for about three and a half years now.

Allen: What is Clicky and where did the idea come from?

Sean: Clicky is designed for small to medium sized web sites, with a strong focus on usability and data presentation. It started as an internal project at my last job. We wanted a tool that showed us what individual users were doing on our web site in a clean and easy fashion, and there was absolutely nothing that was both cheap and good. We liked the results a lot, and decided to make it into a public product. That was about 9 months ago.

Allen: How does the service work?

Sean: People sign up and are given two lines of HTML to add to their web site. One line of javascript sends us lots of juicy details about everything happening on your web site. The second line is a backup image based tracking system, so we can still track users who have javascript disabled, although we can't get quite as much data out of these people. Then people can view their data on our site, which is updated in near real time.

Allen: What makes Clicky special?

Sean: Our focus on usability and data presentation is key. Most of the data available from our service is also available from many other services. But it's either confusing or poorly done. Our interface is very clean and easy to navigate, and the data is presented in a way that makes sense. We also have some really cool features like Spy (a live view of people using your web site), an API, custom data tracking, and outbound link tracking (which I've found extremely useful).

Allen: What's the team like at Clicky?

Sean: Well, there's just two of us, and we live in different cities, and we work out of our homes. So we don't see each other too often, but we do talk by email or phone just about every day. I am the programmer and my partner handles business stuff and other non-techie details.

Allen: Who is using Clicky? Bloggers, corporate sites, etc?

Sean: All types of sites. Not sure if any major corps are using it, but there are plenty of business sites and other non-blog sites using Clicky. About half our sites are blogs though, which is one of our our target markets.

Allen: Who are your competitors?

Sean: There's about a billion analyzers out there, but the only ones I consider as serious competition are Google Analytics (it's free and everyone loves Google), and Mint (the only analyzer that's ever made me say "wow, that's cool").

Allen: Sell me on using Clicky instead of Google Analytics.

Sean: I'm perfectly fine with people preferring GA over Clicky, as Clicky isn't for everyone. It really depends on your web site, but the people who like it swear by it. If you have a relatively high traffic site, and are only interested in trends, then GA is a great product, no doubt. We don't offer nearly as much trend data or cross-segmentation of data as they do, but we offer a great interface, a lot of detail on individual users, and have a ton of features that GA does not offer - real time data, an API, stats via RSS, Spy, custom data tracking, tag clouds, outbound link tracking, download tracking, non-javascript support, feedburner RSS statistic integration ... the list goes on. So, it depends on what you're looking for.

Allen: Do you have a monetization plan? If so, can you share some details? Are you funded?

Sean: Yes, we make money off premium subscriptions, ads, and licensing. We're completely self funded at this point.

Allen: Can you share some details about your marketing plan?

Sean: We have done exactly zero marketing. We have spread purely by word of mouth.

Allen: What's coming in the next 3-6 months for Clicky?

Sean: We just released a fully customizable Dashboard that's a lot of fun to use and offers some great trend data. The technology behind it will be spreading to the rest of the site within a few weeks. We also want to offer a number of widgets for our users to put on their web sites. We have a contest going on right now with over $600 of prizes going out to the people who can create the coolest widgets using our API, so we're hoping this will be a good start for that. Beyond that, I'm always making improvement to the backend code and database, and tweaking the interface here and there. We also have a top secret feature that will be coming in a month or so, that I can't talk about right now. We're really excited about it though.

Allen: What's been your biggest lesson learned since you started Clicky?

Sean: We've had a lot of people approach us about potential investments, or partnerships, or helping us out in some regard. Unfortunately, these people tend to be greedy, flaky, or both. So, be wary. If you are interested in help or money, consider initiating the relationship yourself.

Allen: Now that the pageview has been declared dead, where do you see analytics moving over the next year?

Sean: Not sure. Trend analysis is a pretty hot topic right now, and we plan to offer a lot more of it when our infrastructure can handle analyzing all of that data in fun and interesting ways. This is where GA really shines. Unfortunately, we don't have billions of dollars in the bank like Google does, so we don't have ten thousand servers running this thing.

Allen: How important is analytics to a Web site or blog?

Sean: I would say that if you're not using analytics on your site, you're insane. It's extremely important and useful to know how people are using your site, and how they're finding it.

Allen: What advice do you have for those thinking about starting a web application?

Sean: We entered a very saturated market, which includes a competitor (Google) that most people run home to mommy about. But - if your idea is good, or your product has unique features that other similar ones don't, you can succeed! We are making enough money for both of us to live off of, and then some. If you want to make money, have a monetization plan other than Adsense. Adsense is crap unless your site is content oriented, and web 2.0 "service" sites do not have the content to produce good ads. Consider running your own ad service (like we do), or use something like text-link-ads.com. "Freemium" service is also a good way to go (free service with limitations, pay service for full feature set). It's what we do, and it works well.

Allen: Which RSS feeds are you reading these days?

Sean: I prefer actually visiting web sites for content. Using aggregators for content is a sweet idea, but just too much information for me to digest. Daily, I read Slashdot, Engadget, JoyStiq, del.icio.us/popular, and TechCrunch. I also read Avinash Kaushik's blog (it's all about analytics). However, I do use RSS for one thing, and that's to keep myself up to date on our competitors without too much effort by subscribing to their blog feeds ;)