

Useful Analytics Strategy for Early-Stage Startups - matm
http://data.heapanalytics.com/the-single-most-useful-analytics-strategy-for-early-stage-startups/

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Fuzzwah
This idea reminds me greatly of something I learned back around 2003 while
demoing our HL2 mod, Dystopia, to the guys at Valve.

During our closed beta testing we'd always dump a heap of "how to play the
game" style info onto people who we brought in to help us with testing. I had
all this info and a whole elevator pitch ready to give the Valve crew when
they sat down to play our game.

They stopped me from giving any info, tips or advice. The way they test games
is to watch people play them with out any prep. Just shut your mouth, stand
behind them and write down anything that they have trouble with or generally
fumble around with. Any part of the game which they couldn't intuitively grasp
needed to be reworked.

It was definitely one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. It was
truly painful to watch people, my heroes no less, completely fail to work out
wtf they were meant to be doing and not explain it.

However it was by far the most productive test session in the 3 years we'd
been working on the game. It completely showed our "baby" in a different light
and we instantly knew we had a heap of work to do.

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ivan_ah
Does anyone have experience using Piwik (or another free analytics suite) for
individual user analysis?

I run a fairly simple site with a few "interactive parts" and some calls to
action, and it would be amazing to see individual tracks of what each visitor
did. Do they read the PR text? Do they click on any of the interactives? Etc.

I'm using GA events now, and it gives me a rough idea of what is going on, but
not the _sequence_ of events, like what happened before they decided to click
on the call to action.

Amy recommendation for tools that can make this happen?

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matm
Heap's list view was built for this exact use case:
[https://heapanalytics.com/features/users](https://heapanalytics.com/features/users).
We use it all the time for developing a better intuition for our product.

(I'm a founder of Heap.)

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ivan_ah
OMG, I just started using Heap and it's exactly what I was looking for. Where
have you been all my life?

Thank you so much for posting your comment.

