A Hotjar History

Hotjar started as a self-funded European startup headquartered on the island of Malta. Our founding team included experts in Product / SaaS Development, Web Marketing, UX and Conversion Rate Optimization. Dr. David Darmanin, a conversion rate expert and Hotjar's Board Chairman, brought the versatile Hotjar team together in early 2014.

When building Hotjar, David reached out to some of the best people he had already worked with during his career and it quickly became evident that the five co-founders (Erik Näslund, Johan Malmberg, Marc von Brockdorff, and Jonathan Vella, together with David) would work well as a team.

Together, they defined Hotjar's Vision to "To give teams of all sizes the insights they need to create experiences their users love", and then went to to make that vision a reality.

Today, Hotjar empowers users to gather information about how their website or app is being used, and why. Our team has grown from 5 to ~400, but we all still believe that to truly empathize with your visitors and get the most actionable and valuable results, you must look at the what (analytics) and the why (feedback) together. That's why we are here.

Hotjar has been around since 2014 and our service is now used on over a million sites spread across 180+ countries. We’ve been fortunate to grow very fast, work with a variety of industries and websites, and be trusted by a lot of big brands. In August 2021, we were delighted to join forces with Contentsquare. In November 2022 we expanded our product to with Hotjar Engage, a user-testing and interviews platform, to give our customers access to an extra serving of empathy in the product development process.

Want to know more about us and our journey? We've documented our story on our blog: part 1 and part 2. We believe in being honest and transparent, so you’re going to get a lot of details about how Hotjar was set up, our best and worst moments, and the long way ahead. Feel free to roam around the rest of the blog, too: you’ll find behind-the-scenes stories and lessons we've learned, and you’ll get a really good idea of the people behind the company. Enjoy!

Information on this site was developed by Hotjar, Ltd. and can not be reproduced without our express written consent.