David Darmanin, the founder and chief executive of Hotjar, a successful startup headquartered in Malta that analyses website use, has been featured in the latest issue of SaaS Mag, a respected international publication focused on SaaS (a method of software delivery and licensing in which software is accessed online via a subscription).

Counting giants such as Shopify, WordPress, and Squarespace among over 350,000 clients who use the tool to understand and improve their users’ experience, Hotjar is certainly a success story in its field, and their ultimate aim is “to build a long-lasting, sustainable, and purposeful business with happy team members and happy customers”, the CEO tells SaaS Mag.

In the in-depth interview, the CEO discusses his experience leading up to the startup’s founding, as well as how Hotjar works and the company’s success and ethos when it comes to its remote, or as Mr Darmanin refers to it, “distributed” way of working.

Despite being headquarted in Malta, Hotjar has teams distributed throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia, which Mr Darmanin affirms was a decision that came about as a result of necessity: “Malta is a tiny island in the Mediterranean, so as the company became successful and scaled, it was very difficult for us to find the people that we needed.”

Speaking of the importance of collaboration within their distributed model, he continues, “the key word here is ownership. Just like you’re distributing budgets and allowances, you want to be distributing ownership.”

Addressing the struggle of equating the way team leaders may be used to tackling things in the office with their chosen model, the CEO maintains that it requires rethinking the outcomes you want to create. “For example, if you want good relationships with teams, you need to invest in them, versus relying on serendipity in the office of bumping into people. It’s a very different game, and on a leadership level, it does require a different mental model to achieve it,” he says.

The full interview with David Darmanin on SaaS Mag is available here.