This started off as a post about the future of Hab.la as Olark.com, but it somehow morphed into a post about the history of Hab.la. Look for my next post about the Future of Hab.la as Olark.com soon.
A little over 2 years ago Roland Osborne, Kevin Ferguson, David Eisinger and I founded Hab.la as a cool side project, and Hab.la was just that. A cool side project with a really great domain name hab.la – short sweet, easy to remember. Deciding on a domain name was hard, hab.la beat out jabitat and madagent.tm.
Over the past few years the team has changed, but the goal has remained the same, be the EASIEST WAY to add live chat and REALTIME communication to your website. Hands down, Period! Help website owners turn their passive websites into active storefronts where they can meet and interact with visitors to their website. One up this web 2.0 craze by providing people a simple way to make their website more personal, and helping website owners react to the needs of their customers – and connect with the leads who are already coming to your website.
Hab.la began a virtual company with founders spread out across the country. The current team is based in Mountain View, California and consists of me, Ben Congleton, Matt Pizzimenti, Andrew Fayad, Roland Osborne, and Brandon Dimcheff. Kevin Ferguson continues to serve us as an adviser, but has picked another path (keeping things shipshape at Meebo). We have many advisers, but Dug Song and Gagan Palrecha have advised us from the start.
A few months ago we received seed funding and went full time. A lot has changed in the meantime. We’ve launched paid premium editions of our Hab.la product. We incorporated as Habla Incorporated in Delaware. We’ve redesigned our website to cater to our increasingly business oriented audience, but tried to keep some of the cartoony fun from the original Hab.la days. We’ve stabilized and improved the underlying architecture that drives our messaging system while setting the groundwork for some really exciting features. Yes our technology is exciting, but at the heart of our efforts is the goal to provide outstanding service to our customers.
We are a customer focused company. Customers first, technology second.