When Olark passed the 10K customer mark in 2015, my co-founders and I reflected on five years of bootstrapping and building Olark live chat from a hobby to a business. We have lots to be thankful for, but I am most thankful for my awesome and flexible teammates who care about how we work together.

The challenges we took on in 2014 raised tough questions about our organization. What are our most important projects? How do we determine our priorities? How do we find the right teammates to solve a problem? Who makes decisions in a "flat" structure? Should we remain flat?

Every day, Olark sees more than 3 million visits across thousands of different websites and browsers. We constantly have to ask ourselves: are we causing any issues or slowdowns on our customers' websites?

Knowing the answers to these questions is critical to our success.

A casual misstep means we could be silently breaking thousands of websites, halting transactions, angering the world, causing the next recession...you know, the usual.

If you're an advanced API user, you might want to skip straight to our full API section. If you're a new Olark API user, then you've come to the right place.

All sorts of visitors see your site each day. Some might check out your service, visit a few pages… and hopefully even sign up and become a customer. All of your favorite analytics software can show you these visitors with numbers and graphs, but what about the actual people behind those numbers?

Why care about third-party Javascript embedding?

Over the last five years or so, embedding Javascript code has become the norm. Much of this code is delivered by third-party services like Google Analytics and others. In fact, I just checked this morning and the Olark website embeds at least six separate third-party Javascript tools ranging from website analytics, to A/B testing frameworks, to commenting systems…and of course our very own chat box.