Issue link: https://maltatoday.uberflip.com/i/1126183
06.06.19 10 INTERVIEW Understanding internet user David Darmanin is the founder and CEO of Hotjar, a business which helps website owners understand user behaviour and optimise conversions. He is the winner of EY Malta Entrepreneur of the Year™ Award 2019. In June, he will travel to Monaco to represent Malta and compete in EY's World Entrepreneur of the Year™ award together with business leaders from more than 60 countries MASSIMO COSTA How did you start out in the IT sector and where you trained locally or abroad? I am actually self-taught. I started off in graphic design, and from there moved on to learn user experience de- sign, marketing and copywriting. What gave you the idea to create Hotjar and how did it grow and develop since its inception? For six years I worked in a software company where we struggled to fi nd the right tools we needed to improve the experience and improve our conversion rates. After that experience I spent two years consulting some of the biggest digital brands in the world. During this time, I realised that these companies were also struggling with the same challenges I had faced earlier in my career: they needed multiple tools that were expensive and complicated. We built Hotjar to be a simple, aff orda- ble all-in-one solution. We launched a beta late in 2014 that lasted until mid- 2015. During this time Hotjar was tested on over 20,000 sites. Since then we've fo- cused on improving Hotjar based on the feedback from our users and customers. In what ways does Hotjar help website owners and what does it offer over and above its competitors? Hotjar helps website owners to un- derstand how people are really using their site – it aids them to make sense of the numbers they see in their analytics tools. We call this "behavior analytics" and includes seeing where people click, how far they scroll and recreating their ex- perience. Over and beyond this Hotjar also al- lows website owners to understand why their users behave the way they do by using "user feedback" tools. Hotjar is diff erent in that we combine this feedback with behavioural analytics (at the "hip"). We also don't have a "sales team" you need to speak to before you can use and test out the platform. We're very much "self-serve" and anyone can just create an account and start using Hotjar. How many businesses make use Internet and connectivity is good for an island our size. eGovernment services have improved – but still have some way to go to become simpler and easier to use