IconFinder, Copenhagen-based startup that delivers high quality icons for web designers and developers, has recently shared some insights on the company’s stats for 2013. We asked Martin LeBlanc, IconFinder’s CEO & Co-founder about major challenges of the previous year and IconFinder’s ambitions for 2014. And here’s what he shared.
Last year IconFinder has reached some impressive numbers. It is in 2013 that the number of icon downloads has hit 156 million! At this point IconFinder hosts the world’s largest collection of premium icons, with over 340.000 icons in stock and 2.1 million visitors per month (more stats).
Of course, there are some challenges that kick in as companies start growing. In 2013 IconFinder had to deal with challenges related to building a new marketplace on the site. According to Martin LeBlanc, IconFinder is a large IT project to manage and execute. It requires tons of decisions on code structure and design as well as business related aspects such as pricing and policies. On the other side, there was a challenge to convince all the talented designers to upload hundred thousands of premium icons to the site, answer questions and fix bugs in the process.
“Unfortunately we didn’t have the bandwidth to both focus on building all this new stuff and the supply side of the marketplace, so we didn’t do a lot of new features for the end users, which leads me to the plan for 2014!” shares Martin LeBlanc in the email.
It is still January but IconFinder is only one week away from a major revamp of the front-end where they will introduce some very useful (and requested) ways of filtering icons in styles (e.g. glyph, flat, 3d etc) and categories (e.g. finance, health care, Christmas etc).
“Most of 2014 will be focused on making the site super useful, now that we have the content in place,” says Martin LeBlanc.
2014 will also be about marketing and getting people to use Iconfinder. It is estimated by the company that about 80% of American web developers and designers don’t even know about Iconfinder, so the management sees there an opportunity for massive growth. However, the difficulty is in finding a scalable model for this ambition that won’t cost a ton of money.
“We expanded our team with three new talented guys in 2013, a backend developer, a designer and a marketing guy. A front-end developer has joined us on freelance basis in 2014, so we are moving faster than ever now and it’s a lot of fun!” says Martin LeBlanc.
IconFinder is definitely winning on being user-friendly and super simple to use (judging by how easy it was to find their own logo in different formats and sizes just with few clicks). We wish them good luck with agenda for 2014!
