Introducing Atarim: Our 18-Month Journey from WP FeedBack to Today

When WP FeedBack launched 18 months ago, our own agency’s internal needs led to the initial release of a simple visual feedback tool that we wanted to use with clients.

It goes without saying, we’ve come a long way from day 1.

As we were gaining massive traction, user results and feedback began pouring in, we kept expanding our basic WordPress plugin and quickly became the leading solution for website feedback within the WordPress community.

From listening to our users and getting deeper into the problem we were solving (collaborating seamlessly inside WordPress websites), I felt that we needed to give you, our users, a more granular view of your workflow and the feedback you were gathering from a growing number of your clients and websites.

The first method, before the Agency Dashboard, was pushing all the requests to your email inbox. That worked for a bit but was counterproductive to our initial vision of getting you out of the mess that managing clients at scale via email creates.

I also found that the headaches we were all experiencing with our clients had a broader problem that, with our initial recognition and focus, we were perfectly positioned to tackle…

That’s when our cloud-based PRO Dashboard (now evolved into the Agency Dashboard) was introduced – as a simple and intuitive way for managing all the requests that were coming in.

This is also when we officially evolved from being a plugin company to a cloud-based application (or a SaaS) with a plugin.

Kind of like Intercom or Zendesk or Hubspot each has WordPress plugins to integrate into their cloud-based application.

It goes without saying, we’ve come a long way from day 1.

WP FeedBack Transitions To A Fully-Fledged Platform

WordPress powers close to 40% of the entire internet now and even at the time of our launch, having some experience building WordPress plugins through my agency, it was the logical first step to develop a plugin that helps agencies (including us) that rely on WordPress as their content management system of choice.

Solving the problem for this specific, yet still sizable subset of the web design industry was a huge feat, and we’re proud to have come so far from the initial launch of our plugin to where we are today.

Although the Agency Dashboard was added to our roadmap just a couple of months after the initial launch, we hadn’t realized just how much of a difference it would make.

The amount of time it saves & the flexibility we have when developing compared to developing within the confines of a WordPress plugin were unimaginable. The plugin (or “The Atarim Client Interface Plugin” as we now call it) became just the client interface to make their life a lot easier when providing you with the content you need for the build, the feedback on your designs and the ongoing requests that come as part of your Care Plan services – The agencies that were seeing the most substantial results stopped working from the plugin and started working from the dashboard.

Ourselves (and customers included) all had a realization that now that this was possible, this is the way to use our platform which since launch has transitioned from a plugin to a full, cloud-based solution for client collaboration, team management, project delivery and ongoing support.

Introducing Atarim – The Logical Next Step

As the product and vision for WP FeedBack evolved, so has the brand’s needs.

We’re no longer just a plugin nor we were no longer just a feedback tool.

Though the name suggested that we are exactly that:

The “WP” in WP FeedBack suggested we’re a plugin and the word “FeedBack” suggested that we’re, well, a feedback tool!

To position ourselves for these recent changes & all of our upcoming plans, we’re excited to announce that we’re also rebranding to Atarim.

Why Atarim? Great question!

The literal meaning of “Atarim” is “Websites” in Hebrew, my native language.

I was never a huge fan of vague names that only a handful of people know the meaning of the word, I was more of a literal name kind of guy.

But now, going through this journey over the past couple of years, I can see the appeal.

A literal name (Like WP FeedBack) signals to people what you are straight out of the gate, but it’s limiting if the vision expands beyond it’s initial scope.

Also, for our existing and potential users, I want them to see us as a much broader solution than what our initial competitors and the companies we were compared to have to offer. They now have nothing on us! ?

It’s a great place to start as I’m certain that it helped up get the traction we experienced early on by lighting a light bulb in the minds of our potential users as soon as they heard the name – “Nice! a feedback tool for WordPress!”.

But now, and with the upcoming additions to the platform, we need that “generic and vague” term that will be associated with the company – I found that with these kinds of brands, the company makes the name and not the other way around. I feel that we have enough influence and power to take this step and make this happen.

What’s Next?

Going forward, we’ve rebuilt our website from scratch. As you can tell, the current (WP FeedBack) website no longer truly conveys what Atarim is and what it’s capable of.

This comes together with version 2.0 of our product that takes things to new heights with a cleaner UI based on what we learned over time, a whole bunch of new features like our Agency KPIs screen, team activity feeds and a few more products that you can now cancel as they are built into our platform – such as storage apps like Dropbox, project management tools like Trello, time tracking tools and image optimizations for web tools.

And this is just the start!

You will see more and more tools being removed from your extremely fragmented workflow that our industry has forced us into since there was never a platform that was designed specifically for the needs of web agencies and freelancers. That is until now ??

This year, we also started running weekly sessions with our users (as well as others interested) to showcase the power of Atarim and to help educate the WordPress community and our industry for better practices for managing projects, clients and teams when running and growing a web design & development business.

When I was teaching guitar in my early 20’s I used to say to my students: You can buy the best guitar in the world (or in our case the best tools) but if you don’t put in the work to learn and implement, it’s worthless!

Interested in joining us? Learn more & register here…

Our aim is to continue building fast and release v3.0 of Atarim by the end of the year & we have a whole range of incredible and super innovative features planned for our Agency Dashboard and our Client Interface Plugin – with the goal of continuing to empower the industry and community that changed my life and completely eliminate the time we spend being “slaves to the grind”.

Welcome to Atarim – The first and only client-facing web agency management platform designed to speed up your work, client collaboration, and team management.

Start Collaborating On ANY Website in Seconds

Simply add a URL in the field and see the magic happen (Any URL)

Hidden
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
Free Forever | No Credit Card Required

Ditch the endless email ping pong and start collaborating on your creative projects.

Your team deserves more than spending hours decoding messy screenshots and in endless, repetitive email threads. Start delivering your best work faster. 

Free Forever | No Credit Card Required