Welcome to Clever Groups (and how I came to own it)
Hi, my name is Rob Hellstrom and I am the CEO of Clever Groups. Welcome to my first blog post of this amazing thing called Clever Groups.
It sounds like I am speaking as if at the starting line, but for over 6 years now, Clever Groups has been helping people around the world to do the impossible entirely for free. It has saved countless hours of time for its users, and frankly, made hundreds of thousands of people happy,
If you don’t know what it does yet, in simple terms, it helps someone arrange people into teams, structure room or class layouts, accomodation arrangements, travel groupings, group exam marking, etc taking into account everyone’s preferences. And that’s really hard to do with even 30 people quickly, let alone 100’s or 1,000’s of people. But it’s not restricted to any one industry or organisation size, as it has been used to organise large people group events like hackathons, exhibitions, fire drills, scout jamborees, and so much more.
In May 2024, with over 200,000 users and rapid growth, after 6 years, the founder who had conceived, developed and operated the site himself, had had had enough of the ongoing responsibilities and costs burdens and decided to shut Clever Groups down.
At the same time, my wife, who is a teacher, and had been using the website for over a year, and had become reliant on it, told me that it was shutting down and that I had to do something!
So I contacted the founder, Martin, based in Denmark, and negotiated and agreed to buy the business. I now owned Clever Groups!
Of course, Martin was very happy the site would continue to operate.
But now I was at the starting line and excited for what it could become.
What I didn’t know then, and potentially you don’t know either, is that despite the lack of marketing, the website usage had been growing exponentially and continues to this day. There was no way the original founder, Martin, could have handled this going forward as-is, and something had to be done right away if this was going to help people into the future. It was an inspirational welcome to clever groups and the huge effort made by Martin over this long period of time.
So there will be a few changes over time in order to support this growing user base.
The capacity of the entire site has been upgraded to support the website for the next 18-24 months. This was urgently needed as customers were experiencing performance issues and sometimes the site would freeze. The new site is now running on a much larger platform in the USA. More work will be done over the next 24 months to migrate and build more capacity and significantly improve resiliency.
For now, the function of the site is well understood by users and what it does, it does amazingly. So for this relaunch of the site, I opted to keep the functionality familiar to its many users. Over time this will change and develop hopefully with more feedback from users!
Whilst there are many many new features to develop and bring to market, this blog post marks the relaunch of the website dealing mostly with the above critical issues. I am really excited to build on this base to now develop all the new features users have been clamouring for, to make Clever Groups even more valuable for you.
Beyond the current functionality, people are wanting more information in the reporting, and more options in deciding how to produce groups. Beyond listening and engaging with the many customers via the support email, and talking with users (predominantly school teachers) around the world, I could see I needed more algorithmic and team psychology support, and I have engaged multiple academics specialising in the field of group psychology and group algorithmic theory to help guide me to significantly redevelop new capabilities to take Clever Groups to a whole new level. And I am really really excited to share more about that soon.
Because the website had been operating for free there was little expectations around support but it had become significant and is still growing, fast. Clever Groups will continue to deliver email support.
So once again, welcome to Clever Groups. I can’t wait to hear more stories from you all, and hopefully get them up on this blog or our YouTube channel. If you are a seasoned user, I would love to give you an opportunity to others know how you have been using it.
The last half of 2024 has been very exciting for me, and I can't wait to share the changes I plan for 2025. I hope to bring you more updates shortly. Watch this space!