
SaaS Onboarding Metrics for Developers - jasonkester
http://www.expatsoftware.com/Articles/saas-onboarding-metrics-for-developers.html
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tedmiston
The whole time I'm reading I'm wondering, "Why did he build a relational
analytics system? That can be painful to scale." and "Why did he roll his own
analytics stack vs using something drop-in like KeenIO?"

The last two paragraphs about signing up for his service instead of rolling
your own clarified all that. I'm a big fan of this blog and it is high value,
so I don't fault the author for a little self-promotion, but I do wish this
would have been mentioned at the top.

Nonetheless it's a solid article and I think rolling one's own analytics
system is a fun exercise for the reader, especially when you have time to do
so. On the surface it's such a simple schema but making analytics fast at a
big scale is challenging.

On Unwaffle - I like that the pricing is based on number of new users per
month vs total users. I didn't see the length of the trial period defined on
the pricing page (please add). P.S. Trying to load the pricing page in Mobile
Safari breaks a little bit — I had to refresh to see it.

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jasonkester
One nice thing about SaaS is that scaling problems are almost always a good
thing. This was something I actually first built to shake the trial churn out
of S3stat, and to be honest there's nothing that would make me happier than to
see that trial funnel grow to the point where it starts choking the little
analytics ping catcher.

"[personal assistant], be a doll and grab a few hundred thousand out of the
petty cash drawer and hire a few contractors to scale the analytics server"
(Sent from my BennetonShipToShorePhone)

As to Unwaffle, right now the trial period is "30 days, plus however long it
takes Jason to get around to implementing billing". I'll experiment with 60
and 90 day trials once it becomes an issue. For now, though, it's definitely
at the beta stage.

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jasonkester
Author here. This is a technique I've been using for a while that I find to be
as effective as A/B testing if not more so in moving the needle, trying to
gain users for my product stuff.

I'm happy to answer questions about anything I glossed over in the article.

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dkn
Thanks! This is really cool.

I wonder if you could delve into some of the more long-tail SaaS tracking
methods you have found to be successful. Additionally, if there were any
pitfalls you found specific to the SaaS space, I would love to know about
them.

We are embarking on a new (mostly) discrete segment of our existing SaaS
product, and we know that we need to learn more about how users are using our
site from the very beginning. Hoping for a big early win, as you said :)

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OoTheNigerian
So how does Unwaffle differ from Heap Analytics and Mixpanel?

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jasonkester
Focus.

Those other things are good general purpose analytics tools of the "throw tons
of datapoints at them and they'll give you pretty reports" variety. I think
one of them can even track data for specific users.

But they're all things to all people, whereas we're Onboarding & Lifecycle
things for SaaS people. So we know and have opinions about things like Trials,
paid vs trialing vs expired vs cancelled, etc.

And while you can probably get some good actionable data out of those other
tools with a bit of work, it won't be front and center on your dashboard right
out of the box.

With our thing, your overview screen will be filled with things you care
about, no customization required. And there won't be any extraneous reports
lying around that don't fit what you're doing.

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OoTheNigerian
So one will still need one of those to keep tracking app usage post
trial/conversion to paid?

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jasonkester
Not for retention or lifecycle stuff, at least. Unwaffle also watches paid
users as they churn away or stick around, and works the same magic on them.

