I hate to be a downer, but sometimes these things don't sit right with me.
"After successfully launching their consumer offering (7% week-over-week growth!)"
Why are the traffic charts essentially flat for the last 6 months, or worse on quantcast.
I think "3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing" is probably the most important, but then I'm not convinced the idea is "sticky" enough in the first place.
I use their product and haven't visited the site in months. I just look at the weekly summaries to get a decent picture of how productive my week was (hours in work opposed to waste of time).
Traffic to their site is not nearly as useful as their signups growth is for statistics.
Fair point. Might be worth having the application show something from the website, so that website stats are more representative, or at least look more impressive :)
Again, fair point :)
As long as the subscriber numbers are good, that's cool. I'm used to looking at websites rather than desktop software so it's a whole different game.
Also depends on their strategy. I'd expect the summary to display some recommendations from a website, maybe some recommended software (adverts), etc Maybe some social networking - "Here's some people who have similar usage patterns to you. Go chat."
Unless you're quantified of course.
I have to say I find Alexa to be pretty accurate these days though. It's got lag, but it seems to get sites in the right sort of ballpark.
do you seriously think any of the public stats sites are able to understand traffic of small sites like ours? Not so much, as it happens. And this fact is pretty well documented (seomoz has some good posts documenting how comscore, alexa, and quantcast don't do so well with smaller sites/services). I'm in NYC on an iPhone- I'll find the posts next time I'm in front of a real screen.
The 7 percent number (we were up to 9 for a while) is user growth-- not traffic. Both are still growing nicely.
This is a great post with a lot of good data that oughta be very interesting to people here. Possibly the best kind of post we could have. I'd like to see a lot more of these. Thanks, Tony!
While I'm sure a lot of people would be willing to (depending on the price, I may be one of them -- I'm a big fan of RescueTime), my understanding is that they are targeting businesses with their paid version.
"Not sure I would ever pay for software to tell me where I am spending my time." --- Maybe not you, but your boss may. Rescuetime needs a function, where it can work in the background, so bosses will see what their employees are doing online.
I worked on a big financial company, and they monitor a lot of stuff. I wouldn't be suprised that they will find something like this useful.
VNC gives them a very fine-grained view. At any moment I can watch what any individual employee is doing.
That information, in and of itself, isn't very actionable. I'd prefer knowing that, on the whole, 10% of my company's man-hours are spent on digg, for example.
I wouldn't blame the designers directly. In my experience designers tend to be pressured into trendy styles. The 37signals look just happens to be what's in right now.
I think the group version could be cool, and might be worth paying for... Think as a project manager you can see how exactly everyone is doing - I.E. the designer spending 30% of each day researching design, and 20% in photoshop... just sounds neat, Im trying the personal version for sure!
It does, however, have the potential for being an employee's worst nightmare in the hands of a micromanaging boss. That's my concern with it being used in a corporate environment.
"Why did you spend 31 minutes 40 seconds reading 'Hacker News' today?!?" "Gee, boss, because sometimes I need a break..."
Why are the traffic charts essentially flat for the last 6 months, or worse on quantcast.
I think "3. We didn’t spend enough time on marketing" is probably the most important, but then I'm not convinced the idea is "sticky" enough in the first place.
Still an interesting read though :)