Opinion
Ben Congleton: Zendesk Hasn't Evolved Its Chat Product in Four Years
“Our chat is far superior to these bolt on chat products, like say HubSpot or, you know, Zendesk hasn't evolved their chat in like four years since they bought Zopim.”
Opinion
VC-Backed SaaS Competitors Must Hike Prices to Justify Valuations
“And I think also like, I'm not trying to maximize overall enterprise value. I think those guys have maximized overall enterprise value. They need that because they need to drive cost up significantly to justify their valuation, which I don't need to do.”
Assertion Contradicted
Olark Created the First Floating Website Chat Box Widget
“And then over time because we are the first people who put this little floating chat box on the internet that created some virality. So like, you know, someone adds this to the site they see it's Olark and then they want it for their own site. Nowadays, that s…”
Insight
Seat-Based Pricing Alone Cannot Drive SMB SaaS Expansion Revenue
“I don't think you can do it on pure seats. I think that was I think that's basically just a challenge of the SMB target. I think you need to have add-ons.”
Insight
Usage-Based Pricing Creates Unpredictable Software Costs for SMB Customers
“I think if you look at sort of some of the competitors pricing where people are charging like for usage based pricing, I mean, it's pretty interesting, but as a SMB, it makes your pricing like super unpredictable.”
Insight
Powered-By Chat Widgets Drive More Viral Growth in B2B SaaS
“Like for example, if you're an e-commerce company, like we end up getting less customers that way. If we were, if you're a B to B SaaS company, you'd see more. I imagine that both drift and intercom have seen like similar growth sort of based on where they're …”
Disclosure
Olark Pays Executive Candidates to Complete Interview Homework Assignments
“We actually did something pretty interesting where we paid people to do homework. So we gave them a bunch of stats that were kind of made up numbers, but pretty close to our real numbers and said like, hey give us like what opportunities you see, what assumpti…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Almost Every Platform Offering Chat Today Was Once an Olark Partner
“Like basically anyone who has chat now was an Olark partner in the past.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Olark B2B Clients Generate Over $5M Annually From Chat Leads
“If you're a B to B business, we have customers that have generated, you know, upwards of five million dollars a year from leads coming off of chat.”
Disclosure
Olark's Average Customer Pays Under $100 Per Month
“On average, a customer of ours pays us like, you know, in the range of, we'll say under a hundred bucks.”
Disclosure
Olark Raised Only $85,000 in Total Outside Capital
“Well, we raised 85 K total, so you can figure out whether that's bootstrapped or not, but I think for any modern company, that's nothing.”
Disclosure
Olark's Partner Marketing Channel Broke When Partners Built Native Chat
“Well, I think like historically, Olark had a very strong partner marketing channel. And what ended up happening is those partners started building chat. And so what we realized was that while that worked really well in the early days, it no longer works strate…”
Assertion Supported
Olark Passed 12,000 Customers at Its Last Public Milestone
“The public number I use is like over 12 K.”
