To all the creators, startups, and digital entrepreneurs: Neontools Launch day has finally arrived! After months of boot camping and hard work, the entire neon team and I are more than happy to finally share our improved neontools with you.
At neon, it has always been our mission to empower digital creatives with the best possible skills and tools to get the most out of their life. With the new version of neontools, we’re getting ready now to take this mission to at least a million people worldwide.
While it would be easy to simply highlight the functionalities of our 8-in-1 essential marketing toolbox in this blog post, I want to shed a bit of light on the history of the tools and give you some context regarding the process of how we rebuilt them from scratch. Karim and I already shared a few insights regarding our motivation for building neontools in our “neontools 2.0 closed beta” blog post a few weeks ago.
From 2018 to here
We started out as an agency, helping smaller and bigger-sized clients with their digital strategies and social media marketing. While our focus back then was on passing on our knowledge regarding ‘everything digital’ and helping to execute the strategies we crafted operationally, we quickly realized that there was a pain point we ideally wanted to solve: Having to switch between separate online marketing tools all the time and paying hefty subscription fees for them.
“The very first prototype of neontools was born in 2018, because we were annoyed by the multitude of different tools we needed for online marketing.”
Based on that, I started to code an early version of tools we could use internally and for our client projects. The very first prototype of neontools was born in November 2018. And, since we were not the only ones who were annoyed by the multitude of online marketing tools out there, we started rolling out an improved product publicly a few months later.
In the past two years, the digital landscape has evolved a lot, and so has neontools and its user base. There has been an incredible demand, especially over the last 6 months.
Since 2020, we’re witnessing the rise of the ‘creator economy.’ Even though the trend has started already in the years prior to that, we recognize that the time to build a life and career on your own terms based on the opportunities the online world offers has finally come.
Just to give you some numbers: Today, there are about 2 million digital creators who make at least six figures in revenues. According to Mediakix – another Influencer Marketing Agency – the influencer economy alone totals $8 billion and is expected to grow to $15 billion by 2022.
“Ultimately, neontools is our technology for the booming creator economy.”
2021 has been good to us so far
Since the beginning of 2021, our neontools user base has been tremendously, mostly thanks to TikTok and its amazing users. Numerous online creators shared positive review videos about our tools – a bit to our own surprise. This allowed us to expand our community to the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Brazil, and many more countries. We’re now reaching almost every corner of the earth.
It makes us extremely proud to see how well our product is received all over the globe, and we’re doing everything we can to live up to the expectations of you – our users.
Full-Stack Developer Mitchio Weber & CEO Misch Strotz
Accordingly, we have done our best to incorporate your feedback into a brand new, optimized version of the neontools. Thanks to you, we’ve learned so much since our initial release that we decided in February 2021 to actually rebuild the entire platform from scratch to provide the best possible experience to you.
We heard you!
As a small, bootstrapped startup from Luxembourg, it has been quite the major step forward for us to take this decision. With the help of our new CTO, Carlos Gonser, who has joined us this year, and a team of great developers and designers (Mitchio Weber, Ludovic Cordier, Julie Wieland, Daniel Wahl, Vinicius Seganfredo), we were able to develop a faster, better designed, and overall improved version.
With a bigger team, we were able to develop a variety of new features that you guys kept asking for, among them our first premium feature: Custom URLs for neon.ly and neon.page (formerly neon.link).
You can now customize URLs instead of using our native neon URLs. This premium feature will be priced at 5.90$ or 5.00€ per month – for both neon.ly and neon.page.
FYI – for the time being, you won’t be able to use the same URL for both tools at the same time, so you need to make a choice.
Furthermore, we have improved the existing tools to make the platform faster, more intuitive, and smoother than ever. More on that in the following paragraphs.
CTO Carlos Gonser
Neon.link is now neon.page
Neon.link micro landing pages are now called “Neon Pages” (neon.page) and come with new link types. You can add dedicated social media links to your page and analyse traffic numbers from past months!
For 2.95$ per month, you can also white-label your pages and remove our watermark.
On top of that, we have improved our Social Login functionalities. It is now easier to link your Facebook and Instagram accounts, which was not always the most straightforward process in the past.
Instaboard is now Social Audit
We’ve also improved and renamed our social auditing tool, formerly Instaboard, and we’re actively working on adding new platforms besides Instagram to it.
But, there’s more: You can now download your collections as Excel sheets for reporting and deep dive your data offline. BTW, this also works with neon.ly and neon.page.
Last but not least, the Hashtag analyzer has also been improved. It will now also cache your searches, meaning that some results will be available much faster.
That being said…
We are extremely happy to launch this first new version of our product, and we have a lot more coming, so stay tuned for more new tools and features very soon.
Neontools has always been free to use, and that won’t change in the future. The only difference is that you now have the option to pay for premium features as you need them.
Once again, on behalf of the entire neon team, I’d like to thank you for your support. It has been an incredible journey so far, and we are dedicated to keeping pushing forward.
– Misch
Co-Founder & CEO
P.S. If you want to stay up-to-date about neontools, feel free to follow us on social media or subscribe to the neon newsletter!
