Another year has passed and a new one arrives, with more energy than ever!
Officially the 18th of December of 2012 I started the company OpenClassifieds LTD. So now it’s been a little bit more than 2 years in a more serious journey to take Open Classifieds to the next level. Result: Nailed it!
As many of you know I started this project in late 2008 as a personal project for one of my sites to learn PHP and other new technologies that I wasn’t using. It got quite a big success in the earlier days but without any kind of business model was difficult to keep on. If you want to know more read our 5 years blog post or story of Open Classifieds.
This blog post is about 2014, to review what we did good, bad and to show off some numbers (some good some not that good).
What we did wrong
- Trello clone , we raised some money but not much, lost a lot of time to prepare the project, video, promo etc..
- Crowdfunding campaign failed, major disappointment here. But kept working for some of this features.
- Video course , proud of this, but we spent a lot of time preparing this course, at this point we made $330 in sales.
- EU VAT, I didn’t get the chance to start earlier which made me work for more than 4 days non sleep to get it right.
- Open eShop, we didn’t spend enough time promoting this great piece of software that we use on daily basis, soon changes regarding this ;)
Conclusion, we lost focus in other failed ideas. We are trying to find new market niches to assure the sustainability of the company.
What was good
- With our new talent Oliver we did a redesign to Open Classifieds/eShop main site and improved many many things on the premium themes and not everything is done! will get even better
- We hired Ewa to build the Open Classifieds guide, great work and many enjoying it!
- Last year we focused on giving a better support to our clients, I am really satisfied at this point, of course can get better but we did a tremendous effort in this ;) we should all thank Kinan for his work!
- We launched Yclas, which took a lot of effort with great results so far. That’s our future.
- Sales doubled!! (also expenses see stats below)
- Partnering with Inmotion has been a great deal for us and for them. Love their support!
- Increase of prices, we have slowly raised the pricing, we were much cheaper (and still) than our direct competitors, and we have still a really small margin of benefits. But, this year was much better and this is directly due to price raise.
- Hiring great freelancers when we needed it, like Roberto, Xavi etc… great work guys!
Some numbers
- 311,128 downloads approx, since we didn’t have a reliable way of counting till recently.
- 4,737 live websites that we can account for, there are many many more but they have removed our link or we lost track.
- 26,426 active subscribers newsletter open rate of 11.4%, we send 1’4 mail monthly per user, total emails sent, 443,877.
- 558.076 sessions, 2.067.454 page views in 2014. 64% new clients, bounce rate 38.84%, avg time on site 3m 59s.
- 1,191 paid customers, average spent per user $151.
- 2,126 support tickets with 13,506 replies!, 971 forum topics created.
- 913 closed issues related to code, improvements, bugs, refactoring…
Here you can compare sales since the beginning of 2013 until today to see the progress:
And 2015?
There are many new things we want to implement to Open Classifieds and that we will be developing mostly thanks to the benefits we got from last year. We are going to reinvest all of it to make the software as good as we can.
We want to improve our support and probably a new tech member will be hired soon to help us in testing, documenting, support …
We will focus a lot on Yclas and this involves improving Open Classifieds a lot, if you are curious keep an eye on the blog posts on Yclas since we release faster there (twice week) than at Open Classifieds.
Let’s see what this new year awaits for us! I am looking forward for it!
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