Aramex has published a report, in collaboration with Wamda and the American University in Cairo (AUC), on Woopra, a real-time customer analytics service. The report looks at the history and growth of Woopra, from its humble beginnings as a student’s project to one of the world’s top ten web analytics service providers. It focuses mostly on what led to the company’s move to the US and why this move was a necessity and how it will be benificial in the long run.

Elie Khoury launched what would become Woopra in 2003 while he was a student at the Lebanese American University (LAU). In 2006, Khoury convinced Jad Younan to become the cofounder of Woopra and turn it into their university graduation project. After their graduation in 2007, Khoury and Younan fully invested themselves into the web analytics platform.

Before analyzing the growth and development of Woopra, the report shares background information on web analytics, allowing any reader to grasp the basic concepts and the field in which Woopra is involved.

The report further explains how Woopra adapted its business model to ensure growth. In its early beta phase, Woopra was free to use but market demand - which overloaded Woopra's servers - forced Khoury and Younan to add a new paid subscription service. The introduction of John Pozadzides helped Woopra to increase its presence in the US market and a migrate to larger, faster servers.

The team’s efforts and willingness to adapt and tackle the challenges before them led to Woopra being ranked one of the top 25 web companies globally in 2009, and also being ranked as one of the top 10 web applications, based on ReadWriteWeb.

The report explains how the Woopra team further changed its business model by shifting from a free beta version to a paid service - those that had accounts with Woopra could keep them, but they would receive fewer features than those with paid accounts. This decision was a hard one, as the report states, the Woopra team fully expected to lose a percentage of clients, but the shift was necessary for survival.

The report also looks at how the percentage of internet users in the US pushed Woopra to relocate from Lebanon and enter the US market. The move gave Woopra access to a large base of potential enterprise clients. According to the report, Woopra is not targeting emerging markets, but mature markets instead.

To download the report, please scroll up and click on the link in the gray box.