John Marshall, founder and CEO of Clicktracks is leaving the company. I learned this today from the Occam’s Razor blog written by Avinash Kaushik. I must admit that I was a bit shocked to see the news.
I began my own, so far, brief journey into the world of web analytics because of a blog post written by Rand Fishkin offering a Free Link bait Idea. This post by Rand resulted in our launching a major web analytics survey, and culminated in our 2007 Web Analytics Shootout Interim Report.
Very early in that journey, I found myself at SES Chicago, and I walked up to the booth at Clicktracks. Standing out in front of the booth was a tall man wearing a suit. Shortly I found myself discussing web analytics with him, and he was incredibly open and friendly. The man, of course, was John Marshall, CEO of Clicktracks.
He kept on talking about what a great opportunity it was for him to talk to someone like me. This was a bit baffling to me, as I was a web analytics rookie at the time, and I was asking for all kinds of free help from his company.
Since that time, I have had many dialogues with John. He is always willing to talk about web analytics, and never seemed to be selling. He simply helped me when I asked. Clicktracks will miss having a great spokesperson as their leader. According to Avinash, John already has some new things planned. We will just have to wait a while to find out what John will be doing next.