Hammer it home, baby!
Hammerkit, the web design solution from Finland, is kicking some butt from the cloud. Their closed beta was unveiled a mere four months ago and now their service is open for everybody and running full speed. They claim to have about 1000 sites produced overall, almost 100 new users daily and nearly 8000 unique monthly hits. The company opened a new office in Liverpool in September and they recently started generating revenue.
I talked with Mark Sorsa-Leslie, Hammerkit’s Managing Director, at the MindTrek conference in Tampere last week. Mark shared that the company has experienced quite a radical shift the past couple of months: they’ve finished building the product and moved towards marketing and sales. Their current users come from over 80 countries, surprisingly concentrating in the developing world.
However, the company is trying to grow their userbase in UK - hence the new office in Liverpool. Mark claims they are taking a ‘lighthouse approach’ in Britain, meaning finding a small number of customers (usually PR and Communication agencies) and having intense face-to-face meetings with them where they explain how to use Hammerkit and what are it’s benefits compared to the competitors. This helps the company not only refine their message and understand their customers’ needs better, but potentially create a trustworthy working relationship and expand their clientele in the future.
Next Hammerkit team is making preparations for round A funding, hoping to close it by the second quarter of next year. Although the company is on a good track and their service is pleasing to the eye and easy to use, they are operating in quite a competitive environment. There are at least two local competitors in Finland, not to mention many more worldwide, especially from the US. Hammerkit differentiates itself by putting much more emphasis on design so let’s see how the the people take, what Mark referred to as ‘true web design in a cloud’!
Image by Markus Wichmann
Has anyone tried this tool yet? Is it any good?
Is there a name for this tool? From Arcticstartup's previous article I learned that: "Hammerkit's tool is a SaaS browser-based WYSIWYG visual editor, allowing designers to copy and paste website elements and functionalities, just as with text and images.", but that's more or less jargon to me.
First, thanks to Anna for the awesome write-up :)
Timothy - we have been labeling HammerKit as a Cloud Service Design System. It lets you build things that are as simple as 5-page website or as complex as TechnopolisOnline.com, (which was actually created with the older version of HammerKit).
The most important thing is you can start to create things that use dynamic data and functionality without needed to know how code. There is a little to learn, as with anything new, but it you check out the videos and perhaps attend one webinar you will be able to do quite a lot.
It is free to use and play with, so why not give it a try! We need all the feedback we can get right now, so please tell us what you like and dislike so we can make it better.
rgds
Mark
Thanks for you answer Mark. I'm afraid I don't have the time to start playing with new tools right now. I was just fishing for some user experiences.
Btw. that Technopolisonline site looks quite nice. How long would you say it takes to build a site like that from scratch?
TPO initially took 4 months to put into place. It was a big site with lots of work to get the data right, so definitely a much bigger project than most HK ones.
It was built using the older version of HK and we learned a lot about how to make the data stuff work more easily in the new version. The changes we have made allows a similar site to be created faster and the data handling to perform better.