Resources

2018 in Review – The One We Thank You For the Awesome Year

by Mary Siewierska

Updated: October 6, 2022

A lot has happened last year. Woodpecker had many feature updates, launches, and overall company growth. Suffice it to say that we have many good things to share with you. I’d love to sum up 2018 at Woodpecker with you today so that we can enter the new year full of fresh ideas. What do you think?

Let’s start with some basics numbers.

More and more b2b companies grow with us

Over 2018 our premium user base has grown to 2.5K b2b companies from about 60 countries. The number has almost doubled as compared to the last year 2017. Here are the numbers that we celebrated:

Thank you to all of you who use Woodpecker on a daily basis and help us grow and improve our software. You’re the most important thing that gets us going and believe in what we do. And we’d love to thank those of you who are with us since the very beginning. Thank you for your grid and hustle.

New team members and new departments

Half a year ago, I wrote that there’s 40 of us on the Woodpecker team. Now, there’s 45 of us. But even today, we’re running interviews for some of the departments. We’ve grown our Marketing team, Support team, and many others.

But we’ve also created completely new departments, such as Customer Success department that is currently running a series of webinars that are supposed to introduce new users to Woodpecker. Interested to watch any of them? They are consistently being uploaded on our YouTube channel you can subscribe here >>

Working on the app

We worked heavily on the core of the app to make it smooth and easy. We also improved, as well as added, a few features. For instance, from this year on, you can set a custom domain for tracking email opens, clicks and unsubscribes to take control over your email deliverability.

Learn more: Set a Custom Domain to Track Email Opens, Clicks and Unsubscribes >>

We also improved the way in which you can tag prospects. We introduced an automatic tagging of unsubscribes and bulk tagging. Here’s a help article about it: Bulk tagging and untagging >>

Plus, due to GDPR (more on that later), we added a new feature, GDPR encryption. If you’re curious about what it is, read: What is GDPR-encryption, and Why We Added it?

As per mailbox connection, we fully integrated with another email provider — Office365.

What’s more, we changed the look of our campaign view and stats board. And created a product roadmap where you can track the newest updates in the app.

Integrations

This year abounded in new integrations. Woodpecker integrated with prospect list building tools, such as UpLead and RightHello.

We also finished our native Pipedrive integration that is released for TeamPro users. Some of you used our API to build their own solutions, or integrated Woodpecker via Zapier or PieSync.

Here we have a list of the most popular Woodpecker zaps >>

Making sure personal data is safe

2017 was the year of GDPR. As any EU app, we needed to prepare for it. We also needed to make sure that you can carry on the cold email outreach with the regulation in mind. We released a lot of educational stuff for you to do that. What we did was we…

Developing Woodpecker blog

Woodpecker blog has come a long way. The number of people reading the blog almost tripled as compared to the previous year. 140K people read the articles that we publish here. There are over 10K people subscribed to our weekly newsletter. We want to thank you for reading and emailing us consistent feedback concerning the blog. It couldn’t be more helpful. And thank you all for the nice words.

What’s more, we have two new people involved in producing the content for our blog. Later this year, Meg Kawałkowska joined our forces in writing the articles. And Margaret Sikora, our Data Protection Officer, contributed a few times too. We plan to involve more of Woodpecker team members in the content production process.

Top 10 most read blog posts in 2018

You can see that the blog post about SPF & DKIM and the one about domain reputation still reigns supreme.

  1. What is SPF & DKIM? And Why You Want to Have It Set Up >>
  2. How to Check & Improve the Reputation of Your Domain and Email Server IP >>
  3. GDPR – General Data Protection Regulation Guide for Email Senders >>
  4. What Are the Email Sending Limits of Popular Email Hosts >>
  5. GDPR – Frequently Asked Questions >>
  6. How to Warm Up Email Address Before Cold Outreach >>
  7. Follow-up Emails: How Many and How Often? >>
  8. How to Write a Cold Email That Actually Works: Six-step Tutorial >>
  9. 26 Tools and Services for Outbound Prospect List Building >>
  10. 15 Places Where You Can Find Prospects, Other Than LinkedIn >>

In 2018 we published 49 new blog posts. We had many guest contributors. We published a “write for us” page where we published the rules for admitting guest posts.

3 new prospect list building tool reviews

3 new customer case studies

To sum up

2018 was an eventful year. And there’s more to come in 2019, especially, when it comes to the changes in the app.

But above all else, we’re extremely grateful that you, dear readers and newsletter subscribers, have stuck around with us. Thank you for the warmest words of support that come from you. Thank you for your inquisitive nature and that you believe in us.

We’d like to thank our customers. Thanks for growing Woodpecker with us. We couldn’t be able to go as far as it hadn’t been for you and your continuous support. Thank you for your perseverance and trust. And also for the kind words and invaluable feedback you give us.

Trial users, thank you for trying out our app. We promise that we’ll keep developing it and maybe we will have a chance to cross paths again.

Many thanks to our Partners. Thank you for believing in Woodpecker so much that you spread a word about it online and offline. Without you, we wouldn’t be able to reach as many people.

Hope 2019 brings a lot of good to all of you, guys. And let’s cross the fingers that we will all achieve what we’re set to achieve.

READ ALSO

How I wrote a cold email that got a 50% reply rate

Not 50% open rate, mind you. 50% REPLY rate. That means half of the people I wrote to actually replied to me. And 100% of those were kind replies. Not “leave me alone” or “unsubscribe” kind of replies. I started some nice conversations and got a couple of people on Skype – which was the purpose of my email. Here’s my exact copy and some comments on how I constructed it.

Why Woodpecker? – How we came up with the name & logo for our start-up

A friend of mine is a musician. He once told me that giving a name to a newly founded band before you even start rehearsing is a bad juju. At least, it’s always appeared to be like that with most of the bands he was supposed to play in. Whenever they came up with an awesome name first, the band hardly started playing together before it was over. So supposedly, a better way is to take an action first, and then try to come up with a name for what you’re doing. I’m not sure if this works the same way for start-ups as it does for bands. But I hope so, cause if it does, it means that we followed the right order with Woodpecker.

Working at Woodpecker: 3 Principles We Stand By

Recently our CEO Matt Tarczynski, together with two other start-up founders, took part in an interview broadcasted by Radio Wroclaw. They engaged in an interesting discussion about modern labor market trends, the role of a leader in the modern world and Millennials’ attitude towards work, money, and life in general. Between the lines, Matt gave some first-hand insights about the core values we live by in Woodpecker. Read more what principles we cherish at Woodpecker.