A couple of years ago a lot of our clients made the change and moved all of their systems from the traditional hardware to the cloud.
This was great and opened up a new world for them in terms of functionality and cost, however, it also presented its own challenges.
One of these was that there was no longer a central location for all of their data, and they were having to search for different metrics and update internal spreadsheets!
So, we decided that it would be great if there was a platform which connected them all together, so that a business could get an overview of their metrics at any time and from any device.
And so https://neatly.io was born. We decided on the name ‘neatly’ as the key here was to avoid the use of spreadsheets and manage your data easily and neatly!
So we started planning with earnest and you can see some of our updates here where we blogged about our journey and progress (or lack of at times) – https://roadto.neatly.io
Neatly.io started to take shape quicker than we thought and before long we had a platform and brand, and opened it out to our clients for feedback, we decided that users and companies should be separate so you could manage as many companies as required, all from one login.
We began with a long list of integrations (and still have this list) on a Trello board and started priortising them, and slowly the platform started to take shape.
We segmented our users into 4 profiles:
- Online Retailers
- Startups
- Accountants/Consultants
- Digital Agencies
Each integration had to offer a service/function to at least three of these profiles before being added to the platform.
Our integrations offer something slightly different, for example our Magento extension allows you to search for your customers and segment them based on order history which you are not able to do within Magento, Google Analytics will show more information depending on your original setup within your Google account.
Neatly.io is a product of iResources, we are a development agency based in Newcastle, UK and have a team of 8 people (although we are looking for more)
We are based in the centre of the city and if you look out of our window you can see St James Park.
The team is made up of a wide range of backgrounds, from creative to devops and digital strategy.
We operate as a flat structure and everybody hold options within the company so everyone is invested in its future and success.
Our founder is Jon Leighton, he has worked in the digital sector for over 10 years and has a wealth of experience in the e-commerce section and has been running iResources for the last 6 years.
Time is the greatest challenge of all, so many integrations with so little time! We now have over 35, with another 10 in development so we are getting there.
There are a few competitors within this industry, all coming from a slightly different perspective and no doubt there will be more, competition is great as it continually pushes us to innovate and provide a higher standard of service and features to our users.
So our plan over the next year is to add more integrations and then create the capability to start manipulating this data to create your own stats and actionable insights and of course our native app and public API!
All this for our ever-growing user’s, how are we going to continue the growth of our user numbers hear you ask?
Well, as our founder lovely nana used to tell him,
“look after your customers and everything else will take care of itself”
Ok, so there is probably a little more to it than this, but it’s not a bad start!