How to bring internal product to the high-competitive market. Story of UserX analytics.
Market of digital analytics and especially mobile analytics seems very appealing. However it is not the easiest one and successful start on such competitive area is a really challenging task even for big companies. In this article I want to share some experience in bringing visual mobile analytics service UserX to the international market. Talk about first achievements and first failures in our pursuit to happiness.
Last year we launched Beta version of visual analytics SDK. We named it UserX, like UX and user, you got it, yeap? Service starts from our internal instrument we used for UX and UI analysis of our own mobile apps. There were a lot of challenging work ahead to make this product successful.
The product was created as an instrument for in-depth behavioral analytics of mobile apps usage. At the moment of launching UserX recorded video of users sessions and collected stats of apps usage.
Quick market research showed that the main competitors in visual analytics area are AppSee, UXCam and Repro, a very similar functionality provides BugSee. As substitute services can be Amplitude, Mixpanel, furthermore Flurry, Google Analytics for Firebase, AppMetrica are absolutely free. Each service has its own strengths and weaknesses, and there were a lot of chances that our potential users will prefer one of them over us.
Results of SWOT analysis seemed disastrous as well as competitive analysis. But the market of mobile apps magnetically tempted us with its wonderful performance: about 5 million apps in AppStore and Play Market, more than 150 thousand of new apps every month (according to analytical reviews at fall 2017). Moreover, the service was almost ready, so we made a decision to get to market with UserX.
Actually we starts right off the boat. Without long modifications of product and preparations of campaign we just launch the product and made our first step to the market. Our aim was to understand if this product can be interesting for mobile apps and if we have a chance to get our own part of the market.
The first supposal was to start communication with mobile developers agencies. We thought that agencies will use UserX for those needs or will be potential partners in distribution process. At the same time we started advertising campaign trying to tell about our service to product companies. We supposed Product Managers, Digital Marketers and Designers to be our target audience, constructed a small landing page and run advertising campaign at AdWords and e-mail. With agencies worked manually with e-mail, Facebook and cold calls.
Communication with development agencies gave us a lot of feedback, but that’s it. We turned out that agencies are not interested in such kind of instruments. A period of apps development usually sufficiently short and the rest of agencies works in reactive manner. They don’t initiate any improvements and don’t try to consider new features for those clients products. Usually agencies don’t even have a product manager or an analyst.
AdWords advertisement almostly came to nought, but e-mail campaign and first article on popular Russian resource for IT specialists (Habrahabr) landed us our first large user — Sports.ru (Russian leading digital media devoted to sport). It seemed like a chance for UserX. So we decided to continue our marketing activities but in more consistent and methodical way. In the winter we hired a staff of marketers.
First of all we start a number of interviews with Product Managers from clients side. In total there were about 90 interviews. As the main factors while choosing analytical system Products emphasized the following:
Pricing system plays role just with all other factors held equal.
According to answers of respondents we filled in our backlog, nothing specific but we prioritized flow of development. The main features was third party integration with other analytical services, crash reporting, heatmaps, conversion funnels (by the way these features are already launched) and users screen flow (in Beta).
But first of all we had to optimize UserX and make it more safety and secure. So we developed a number of methods which hide secure users data from recording. Moreover, developers can manually choose any fields or screens with users personal data and hide them. For financial and banking apps we prepared an offer to distribute UserX as a software. So we can deploy UserX on company’s internal servers without any access from the outside. And recently we’ve optimized UserX to satisfy the requirements of GDPR.
One of the biggest problems in communication was imperception of exactly how UserX can be used for product’s improvement. So we prepared some standard recommendations for service usage:
KPI problems
Sometimes it is really hard to understand real reasons of KPI failure. UserX tools allow you to provide in-depth analysis of metrics deviations. For example you want to understand why a number of users leaves your conversion funnel on any step. Just create a goal at UserX console and watch recordings of sessions with unfavorable behavior.
Ideas of new features
Almost evident use case. Video recordings allow you to gain an insights into your users behavior. You can use records as a support in your mindstorming process or watch video of the most interesting segment of your users and analyze exactly how you can make your app better for them.
Optimization for specific metrics goals
One more obvious case for usage. For example you have two different segments of your users. It could be purchasers and users without payments or hard and low users. Just compare behavior of segments to find the difference between those habits and needs and understand how you can influence those behavior to reach your product goals.
Analysis before and after
You can compare users behavior before and after changes in your product. It is useful when you redesign your product or add new important features.
On the next stage we have chose a number of channels and instruments to promote UserX. The main were are:
1) Content-marketing and PR
2) Cold sales through Facebook
3) Advertising campaigns: targeting and retargeting on Facebook, searching and display advertising at AdWords
4) E-mail marketing
According to content marketing strategy we published a number of articles on Medium, VC.ru and other digital media. Start working on Quora and registered on ProductHunt. Within two month we tried to take a part in every conference in the country and made a presentation at Russian ProfsoUX conference dedicated to user experience in mobile apps. We gathered a great feedback from these activities and understood that UserX can find its part of market. And the most important result of content strategy was our first sale for real money!
Results of cold sales at Facebook were really amazing! We wrote to every Product Manager we’ve found and within the first month start working with a number of large companies. At Russian segment CR from first message into real lead was higher than 35%, and from first cold message into SDK integration almostly 10%! On the global market results were a bit worse: 12% into lead and 2% into SDK integration. The most of the product managers didn’t even read our messages.
Results of advertising campaigns were different:
Yep, just imagine! 14% of users became purchasers in two month after campaign. The second interesting detail was that the best conversion into sale was at users with integration problems — about 44%. Here we should say thanks to our support team and those quickest reaction for any issues users had with our SDK.
E-mail marketing has played a critical role in the whole promotion process. Simple reminder about SDK integration necessity allow us to convert 20% more users.
In conclusion want to share some outputs from these story:
- You should be as fast and flexible as it possible if you want to launch a new product on high-competitive market.
- Cold sales are still effective but nowadays they are about social networks, not annoying calls.
- Content and PR are the main elements of successful product launching.
- Working with clients feedback and communication with your users are possibly even more important than your product’s features and instruments.
- Sometimes market researches don’t shows actual opportunities of the markets, sometimes it is worth a try.
More where this came from
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