Atarim's 2022 year in review

Our 2022 Year In Review – How Far Atarim Has Come

Welcome back to the annual Atarim year in review.

First off, Happy New Year – here’s to 2023! 

A quick summary in case you’re here for the first time: 

  • Atarim is a software solution (and WordPress plugin) trusted by the world’s leading digital teams, from design and dev agencies to freelancers, to improve how they collaborate. For example:
    • Improving how they can receive feedback on websites.
    • Subsequently, assigning those tasks to their team. 
    • All as a part of our mission to make the web collaborative.
  • The first version of Atarim was originally launched as WP FeedBack in 2019. Our agency’s internal needs led to the initial release of a simple visual feedback tool.
  • In February of 2021, we expanded our vision and rebranded to Atarim.  
  • Total websites: 32,584
  • Total feedback requests created with Atarim: over 1,058,899

The outcome: Teams are able to create an easy workflow for their themselves & clients that leads to an increase in project profitability and eliminating client days. 

We Announced Support For All Websites (at WCEU 2022)

In June of 2022, we officially announced support for all websitesmaking it possible to collaborate on sites regardless of how they were built. 

Whether it was WordPress, whether it was a custom site built in Next.js, React, or your favorite frontend framework. 

You can bring your team together to collaborate with Atarim.

This was announced just in time for our third birthday and WCEU 2022 in Porto, Portugal.

I had the pleasure of giving a talk on the main stage.

vito's speech at WCEU 2022 in Porto, Portugal

In addition, we launched our free plan. Start collaborating on any website in seconds, learn more

And we also sponsored WCEU 2022, which was a great experience. Really enjoyed being able to run demos in person and see people’s reactions to seeing Atarim in action & the first questions they had that came to mind.

Atarim as a sponsor of WCEU 2022 in Porto, Portugal

And overall had a great time around Porto with friends: 

WCEU 2022 in Porto, Portugal
friends and colleagues at WCEU 2022 in Porto, Portugal
Vito Peleg, Andrew Palmer, Nathan Wrigley, Anne Bovelett, Stephanie Hudson, Dan Maby (Left to right)

This Year In Product Updates

The Launch of URL-based Collaboration

As mentioned earlier, we announced this at WCEU 2022! This is definitely one of the biggest updates from 2022 and the update that has set the stage for the future of Atarim.

Take Atarim for a spin on a site of your choice today, completely free to get started.

The Relaunch of our WordPress Plugin

relaunch of Atarim plugin

This happened relatively recently (late in the year), but we’re excited to have already crossed some exciting milestones: 

  • 120+ 5-star reviews 
  • 1,000+ active installations

Note: this is an optional deeper integration with WordPress. Many of our users, that are WordPress design and dev agencies, now rely entirely on Atarim’s URL-based collaboration.

The Launch of our New Help Center

Atarim's new help center

We relaunched our help center, merging it back to our main site – the home of all resources related to Atarim: 

Take me to the new Atarim Help Center.

The Relaunch of our YouTube Channel

relaunch of Atarim's YouTube channel

Interested in subscribing? Head over to our YouTube channel here.

Migration To New Infrastructure

We recently made changes to our infrastructure to have servers in Germany where we store data from accounts that were created in the EU (and the UK) to remain GDPR-compliant based on requests from our Enterprise users.

Image-Based Collaboration With Hotspots & Design Journeys

Towards the end of the year (December), we completely revamped our image collaboration experience.

Image-Based Collaboration With Hotspots & Design Journeys

To make it easier than ever to collect design feedback on images, manage your design journeys and version control iterations of your work as you process feedback. 

Focusing On Expanding Our Integration Ecosystem & Partnerships

As a part of making this all possible – we welcomed two incredible new people to the team. Caroline Crossland as our head of inbound marketing, and Alexey Gaverdovskiy to head up enterprise sales. These are our first two full-time, in-house marketing hires, and they’ve hit the ground running quickly, already attending WordCamp Italia. 

Alexey Gaverdovskiy, new team member of Atarim
Alexey at WordCamp Italia 2022

Both will play a pivotal role in Atarim’s growth. Communicating with partners, leading our content production workflow, and tying everything today. In short, helping us bring new functionality to our users and reach a greater number of users in the coming years. 

We now have 12 integrations with platforms, including Trello, Basecamp, Jira, Pabbly, Make, ClickUp, Asana, Slack, MainWP, and Rocket.net. 

MainWP is one of those solutions that most of the people in the WordPress industry will be familiar with (if not also users themselves). It was a great moment to announce our integration with the Dennis Dornon (their founder). 

mainwp and atarim partnership

And after a very successful migration to Rocket.net, we also launched an integration and partnership with Rocket.net

Note: For those unfamiliar with Rocket.net, they are a leading managed WordPress hosting provider. We use them to host our marketing site (the one you’re reading this post on). This is unrelated to the Atarim platform’s infrastructure.

creating a new site on rocket.net using Atarim

A really neat integration that makes it possible to do things like create sites and more, all without leaving Atarim. Learn more about our integration with Rocket.net here. If you’re interested in connecting with our team to discuss a potential partnership – please get in touch, simply use our on-site support messenger (in the bottom right-hand corner), or send an email to alexey@atarim.io.

This Year In Support

Across email support and chat support, we had over 5,400+ conversations with over 2,200 users throughout the past year. Oddly, Teamwork Desk doesn’t seem to support reports with a lookback period of more than 90 days (so this is an estimate).

The support statistics are relatively in line with what we expected following our customer growth this past year. With the launch of our free tier and the ability to collaborate on any website in the world, the nature of our requests significantly changed – with a good portion being pre-sales questions.

Improving support goes beyond response times and resolution times. We remain committed to ongoing improvement in this area. 2022 was a busy year (as you can tell), and we’re committed to making sure the experience, response (and, more importantly, resolution times) continue to improve.

Speaking At Agency Trailblazer Live 2022

Vito Speaking At Agency Trailblazer Live 2022

Later in the year, I also had the pleasure of heading back to the Agency Trailblazer conference. As one of the first conferences that I ever attended when getting into the WordPress industry, and where we originally started building the waitlist in preparation for our initial launch (of WP FeedBack at the time), it was really great to be back and see lots of familiar faces. 

We Raised Our First Funding Round

2022 is the year we raised funding.

When we started Atarim (at the time WP FeedBack) as what was originally a relatively simple plugin allowing clients to submit requests, leaving feedback on websites visually – the company was entirely bootstrapped. 

atarim raises first funding

It quickly became clear that the vision to improve collaboration across digital teams was one that wouldn’t make sense to go at alone, leading to us raising funding from some great people that I’ve personally followed for quite some time was a big moment for us. And, suffice to say, we’re beyond excited for what’s in store. 

funding celebration
Joost and Marieke of Emilia Capital

Read the full announcement: Atarim Raises First Funding Round to Bring Visual Collaboration To The Masses

Personal Updates

Beyond grateful for a year that has been crazy in many ways professionally, this year has also been a big one as a father & for us as a family…

My Wife & I Had Our Second Child. First Son!

Vito's second son

Summary & What’s In Store for 2023

Over the past 3 and a half years, Atarim has transitioned from a simple WordPress plugin to a full-blown platform. As we head into 2023, our core aim is to continue working to create an unmatched collaborative experience. 

In the first half of the year, we’ve dedicated a significant amount of timeline to various improvements to our infrastructure and underlying codebase. The second part of the year focused on continuing to improve the experience. Other things to look out for this year include integrations, improvements to notifications and the real-time characteristic of what collaborating in Atarim is like. We can’t wait to share more as the year progresses, and we ship release after release.

Completing Our SOC2 Audit – Achieving Full Compliance

This is something we’ve actually already made a start on. We’re in the process of obtaining both SOC2 and GDPR compliance certificates from external auditors. 

All of the preparation work from our side is complete, but it may take them a couple of months to review everything. We may do a post all about our experience when it comes to becoming compliant, lessons learned, and tips for other companies out there considering going through the same process themselves.

Team-Related Features

One of the known areas of the product we want to expand related to how teams actively use Atarim and what they want to be able to do in Atarim. 

This includes things like being able to create private, internal tasks as well as tracking project stages so the entire lifecycle of a website can be managed in Atarim. 

Beyond this, a number of other organizational improvements, such as being able to organize projects into folders. As well as touching up details like how grouped notifications work.

Events We’ll Be Attending This Year

The Atarim Agency Summit

We’re excited to run another edition of our own summit (the largest in the industry) towards the end of April – more news to follow soon.

Last year, we had people from Yoast, HubSpot and even Google in attendance.

Note: If you’re interested in sponsoring, please reach out to alexey@atarim.io.

WordCamp Asia (Also Our First Team Retreat)

We’re beyond excited to attend Wordcamp Asia, which will also be the first time we bring the entire team together in person. Learn more about WordCamp Asia 2023.

CloudFest (and CloudFest USA)

We’re sponsoring CloudFest & Alexey will be in attendance. If you’re going to be there and interested in meeting, send over an email to alexey@atarim.io.

This free pass can be used for unlimited registrations to CloudFest 2023, so feel free to use it generously.

WordCamp Europe & WordCamp US

Last year WCEU was a really great experience. This year, we will be attending WCEU 2023 in Athens (with more of the team joining us). Learn more about WCEU 2023.

In addition to WCUS 2023, details yet to be confirmed, here is a link to the event website.

We’re Hiring – The Team Continues To Grow

atarim careers

For those interested in joining us on our mission – we are still accepting applications for development and support roles. 

Interested in joining the team? Learn more & connect here.

Refocusing On Our Website

Atarim's website redesign

We’ve welcomed Dave to the team to bring the visions we have for our own site to life. 

Some of these include: 

  • Launching feature pages
  • Launching comparison pages
  • Improvements to our overall design and developing a consistent design system. 
  • Improvements to our help center

Excited to see these come together & result in a site that’s more indicative of where we’re at as a company and exactly what it is that Atarim does.

Helping more digital teams improve how they collaborate through Atarim’s software suite and resources we create

As a part of our vision and commitment to the community, a big part of 2023 for us will definitely be growing. 

Simply put, to us, that is delivering on the mission we already are, just in a bigger way. 

That is both by reaching more people with Atarim’s collaboration platform as well as with the resources we produce. Through initiatives, including but not limited to: 

  • The Atarim Summit (previously YoY been the largest summit in our industry!)
  • The detailed guides, tutorials, and case studies on our blog.
  • The Atarim Academy
  • Our YouTube Channel

All of this really only begins to scratch the surface in terms of what we have in store for the coming year. The details we’ve shared here are just as a bit of a prelude to some of the smaller improvements we’re making that all contribute to the bigger picture of building an unmatched collaboration experience.

I hope you enjoyed and if you have any questions, suggestions, or feature requests – please feel free to get in touch.

We’re here to help and always happy to hear from you (simply email support@atarim.io or use our in-app support messenger).

We also invite you to join our community on Facebook.

Best of luck to all of you in 2023! ❤️

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