But boy, was I mistaken. Today, I see the time I squandered ignoring a simple yet effective methodology. I’ve come to understand that the essence of a framework isn’t about shoehorning reality into it (let’s face it, reality never fits perfectly). Plus, applying a framework doesn’t cramp your style; instead, it sheds light on your flexibility while helping you grasp the outcomes you’re after for every customer, anytime.

What CJM can help you with is to better understand:

• What are these types of interactions we have with the customer?
• What is the aim and goal of each stage?
• What is the timeline we target for each stage?
• Who owns each stage of the journey?

Let’s break it down in more detail (I’ll also leave a link to the CJM template for you at the end of this post).

What are these types of interactions we have with the customer?

Most of my experience is in B2B SaaS, so while the specifics will vary for your business the stages I usually focus on are:

1. Land
2. Onboarding and Implementation
3. Adoption
4. Advocacy
5. Expansion
6. Renewal

These stages flow naturally, each one stemming from the previous. It's a classic Customer Journey Map approach that I've learned a lot from. When you think about these stages, the logic starts to emerge.

Is it the right time to ask “Customer X” to give a testimonial about our software (Advocacy)? If the customer is just getting started (Onboarding and Implementation stage) — the answer is most probably “No”. The customer hasn’t yet started getting real value out of our solution and it’s early for them to confidently share testimonials.

Can I expect a customer to buy more from us (Expansion) if they are using only a few of our offerings while their contract includes much more (Adoption)? Not yet. Invest in helping them to extract more value and you’ll notice they plan to buy more from you organically.

Can there be exceptions? Absolutely!

For example, a customer might have an extensive POC/free managed trial and during this interaction, they’ve realized all the power of your solution as well as had a chance to interact with a wide range of folks from your team. They could be open to the idea of giving you a testimonial, but remember — you still have to deliver all the other stages after that and maybe even need to start thinking about how you can exceed their expectations now, so you can compensate for that credit given to you ahead of time.

What is the aim and goal of each stage?

This part is key. Each stage needs to give clarity to you on what you’re trying to achieve and how this will benefit your customer as well. It’s a two-way street. If each stage is executed well, you and the customer will be able to establish a long-term partnership.

You also need to have success criteria for each stage (i.e. I can safely consider this stage to be completed when “X, Y, and Z” has taken place).

If you were able to answer what the aim and goal of each stage is, your team will perform as a well-oiled machine.

What is the timeline we target for each stage?

You want smooth sailing through each stage, identifying snags promptly.

Next to each stage, jot down a suggested timeframe. Not too slack, not overly aggressive — it should incentivize your team to move forward quickly and at the same time it should be realistic to achieve.

A customer has stuck in the “Onboarding and Implementation” stage for a few months longer than they should be? It’s a red flag and potential churn . Double down on completing this stage and unleash the value of the product for the customer ASAP.

A customer has completed the “Onboarding and Implementation” stage, but barely used the product in the last few months or in other words hasn’t fully completed the “Adoption”? It’s another red flag. Find out what’s going on and help to increase ROI for that customer.

Who owns each stage of the journey?

Early on, it could be a single function or single team that owns each stage of the post-sale journey. And when things will start progressing and your customer base starts to grow, you might find yourself and your team wondering who’s responsible for the success of each stage.

Take “Advocacy” as an example here. Is it Customer Success or Marketing that drives it?

With CJM in place, it will be easier for you to break down the ownership which would make sense for everybody.

With a Customer Journey Map in place, clarity reigns. In my experience, CSMs taking charge of "Advocacy" makes sense. When a customer evolves into an advocate, CSMs pull in Marketing to work together on case studies, testimonials, or joint webinars.

And remember, advocates should also see the value in being your brand advocate, so think about the right messaging and right execution. I will share some examples too, but that’s for another day.

If you don’t have CJM in place, things start getting very messy and you’ll find your team stepping into each other shoes.

Here is the link to CJM template that you can reuse for your own purposes.

Press on File →Make a copy to edit this spreadsheet.

Adjust stages, enhance the goal of each stage if necessary and make sure success criteria is related to your product. Onboard your team in CJM to make sure everyone is on the same page about how the post-sale journey looks like.

Thanks for reading and I hope it was helpful for you!

“Analytics doesn’t work in the form of reports anymore, but rather in tracking metrics in real-time and being able to make decisions on the fly.” — Mia Umanos, Data Strategy Consultant with Rappler.

When Mia told us that, we had been focused on building scheduled reports for the users already getting analytics updates from Statsbot in Slack chats. But we were getting feedback like Mia’s, and it spurred a change in direction. We needed to focus on building the product our users actually wanted–analytics dashboards with various metrics and visualizations, all updated in real-time. That’s why we built Dashboards.

At Statsbot, we pride ourselves on getting essential product analytics to our customers. So the Dashboards launch presented a unique opportunity. We could use the product itself to measure its results–we’d have to build a dashboard about Dashboards. (We’re going to be talking a lot about the dashboard we created to track the Dashboards product launch metrics. Hopefully, it’s not too confusing!)

We believe in iterating quickly and using data to shape the direction of our products, so the first version of Dashboards was ready within two weeks. That way, we could make sure we were tracking all the relevant metrics to see if the Dashboards product was working for our customers the way we had hoped. In this post, we’re going to walk you through how we used our own product, Statsbot, to surface Mixpanel insights in order to judge the success of our product launch.

This article originally appeared on Mixpanel blog, we’re grateful to our friends from Mixpanel team for cooperating on this piece.

How Statsbot works with data

Statsbot can pull metrics from different data sources and deliver them to Slack, so the whole team can stay updated on their preferred channel. Currently, it integrates with Mixpanel, Google Analytics, Stripe, Salesforce, and SQL databases. We use all of those to track metrics, events and perform anomaly detection.

For the Dashboards product, we wanted to track a few simple metrics initially. We just wanted to see if users create dashboards, pin multiple metrics (engagement), share dashboards with a special auto-generated link in settings (collaboration) and return to their dashboards (retention). While Statsbot users can track a wide range of Mixpanel events such as their funnels, sign-ups, and top events, we wanted a broad overview that would suggest whether or not this product was worth further investment.

And as to how we tracked whether or not Dashboards was hitting the numbers we wanted, there was only one thing to do: create a dashboard about the Dashboards product.

Take a look at the dashboard we created to track the Dashboards product launch metrics.

Getting reports on a regular basis

We wanted to get this dashboard to our team every day at 9 AM in our #analytics channel in Slack, so everyone would get a quick report on the release’s progress first thing in the morning.

For that, we used the Scheduled Reports feature in Statsbot, which can deliver any metric or dashboard you need in Slack, on a recurring basis–either hourly, daily or weekly. Like the users responsible for the other 1.8 million scheduled reports generated on Statsbot this year, we were grateful to save the time it would have taken to generate these reports manually.

Setting up a goal to get actionable reports

Just tracking the progress wasn’t enough. We needed to know if we were hitting the targets we had set for the launch. So we used Statsbot’s Goals feature, which produces a prediction about how likely you are to reach your goal by the end of the month. Its advanced machine learning-powered algorithm tells users whether you’re ahead of or behind schedule to hit your mark.

We set the goal “5% growth in unique dashboards openings month over month” to see if users were engaging with the Dashboards product. Goals helped us to track progress, stay motivated and adjust our strategy quickly.

Shortly after the launch, we’ve noticed that engagement was not growing as expected and we started communicating with our users to get their feedback and understand what we were doing wrong. It turned out that only a few people users per team were using Dashboards–often just the ones who had created them. The rest of members found it difficult to sign in to their account every time they need to look at reports–or they just didn’t know how to do it and didn’t care. For them, it was simpler to just ask for a screenshot.

As a result, we added a shared Dashboards feature with auto-generated links that could be used by anyone with no need to stay signed in at Statsbot. Using insights from Mixpanel presented in Statsbot, we identified a problem and solved it in real time. Our clients met this feature with enthusiasm; some even started to stream their dashboard to a TV in their offices!

But the evidence for this change’s success isn’t just anecdotal. Users are finding value in shared Dashboards.

Instant analytics insights

Lastly, we wanted to be able to track potential errors and act quickly if something had gone wrong. For that purpose, Statsbot has a Streams feature which is only available for Mixpanel users. Because Mixpanel allows users to catch events in a real-time, Statsbot can send a report with a specific metric in Slack immediately.

Thanks to streams, we could be proactive in dealing with any errors, rather than only knowing something had gone wrong when tickets started coming in to support. In one instance, Streams caught an error notifying us that charts on shared Dashboards has been broken for several clients, and allowed us to resolve the problem quickly.

Results

Although dashboards are a common feature in many business intelligence tools, their value was not immediately obvious to us. But getting customer feedback changed our own perception of what an analytics tool needed to deliver for its customers. And the feedback we’re getting now has been overwhelming.

Tigh Loughhead, marketing director at Elegran told us, “Statsbot provides executive management with consistent, actionable business intelligence about spikes traffic and revenue, and the overall health of our business.” Salvatore Garozzo, CPO and Co-Founder at Scrunch.com loves the “beautiful user experience, functionality, ease of use and support from the team.” And Andrey Zaytsev, Product Manager at SkyEng loves having the ability “to see all the important data within just one dashboard.”

But as to where we go when we can get the clearest feedback on how our customers are using Dashboards or any of our other products: It’s right there on our Dashboards.

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How to Get All Your Product Launch Metrics Without Leaving Slack was originally published in Cube Dev on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Before joining the Statsbot team, I founded two startups, and the most important thing I learned is that one needs to measure expenses and income from day one.

When you start building a business you might not be able to afford expensive tools for calculations, or haven’t yet found one that fits your needs and budget. However, you still have to do all the calculations, especially if fundraising is not far off.

In my experience, Excel and Google Spreadsheets are two of the best tools startuppers could start with for analytics.

They are rather simple to use if you’re not going too deep with numbers. You actually don’t need to go deep at the start of a business if you don’t want to get in a muddle with complex metrics.

Many Excel templates for startups that I meet online are great and contain lots of useful stuff, but if I found them earlier, without a business background, I would have had no idea what all these complex metrics mean.

That’s why I’ve created my own Google Spreadsheet template, which has all metrics that startups need to track their analytics while staying really easy to understand without specific experience.

Push File →Make a copy to edit this spreadsheet.

Note: It’s always easier to customize a simple solution for your specific needs, then learn how to use a difficult one. I’ve added recommendations to make this process easier for you.

I wish I had this template ten years ago, but I didn’t. Now, I am sharing it for absolutely free because I want everybody to have the possibility to measure their data as effectively as possible. You can quickly adjust your own numbers instead of mine, and get financial models and dashboards in Excel for your startup.

In this post, I’ll not only provide templates you could download and quickly adjust to your needs, but I’ll also explain basic metrics for startups, their nature, and their importance.

Expenses

To keep things simple, our costs model will be pretty generic, but quite useful at the early stage of your startup.

The model looks the following way:

• 1 year or 4 quarters
• Let’s assume we have 5 people in our startup. CEO and CTO at the beginning and two engineers plus a designer joining the team later on
• We will include salaries for this team plus fringe benefits (9%)
• Office rent
• Legal costs related to company registration
• Costs related to AWS
• Other tools that are crucial to sustain the business
• We assume that the startup has some cash in the form of founders’ savings or a pre-seed round raised ($300,000)
• We include the average monthly burn rate and how many months you have before all cash will be burned. This is probably the most important part of each startup

Recommendations

• Thoroughly think about all other expenses you might have and adjust the numbers in the spreadsheet.
• Add expenses in the special rows left blank if you have some more.
• Adjust starting capital or pre-seed investments if applicable (note that in order to found a startup, significant capital is not the hard requirement. 😉 You could always start by investing time together with your co-founders and some tiny compulsory expenses to launch).

Earnings

Things are getting more interesting here, and I would strongly suggest you to think about earnings at the earliest. Since I totally agree that “startup = growth … and the best thing to measure the growth rate is revenue”, you’d better address this question.

Startups could have different business models in terms of revenue, and we will focus on the main two in this post — SaaS, and e-commerce. We have adjusted the burn rate for both models and placed it in the Costs sheet because we assume there is some income being generated.

SaaS (software as a service)

The SaaS business model is based on the idea that a user could use software by purchasing a subscription usually on a monthly or annual basis. A lot of SaaS companies provide their solution in the cloud, making time to deploy significantly lower in this case: users just sign up and can start using the tool.

On the other hand, the value that this tool provides is not always clear from the beginning and the aims of users could be widely different, so there’s usually a trial period given. Users can test the product and decide whether it makes sense to purchase a subscription or not by the end of the trial.

Examples of SaaS include Slack, Intercom, Salesforce, Dropbox, and Shopify.

Let’s add some assumptions to our calculations. We will assume that monthly growth in subscriptions is 20%, the average revenue per client is $50, and the monthly churn rate starts from 10% and decreases by 0.5% each month. Lastly, in our first month, we acquire 20 first-time users.

At the early stage of building Statsbot, we came up with a solution to the question of how to automate failed charges in 2 hours.

I have included the following metrics in a separate sheet of our Excel file:

• New customers, Lost customers (churn), Total number of active customers
• New trials and trial-to-paid conversion rate
• Churn rate, i.e. how many users unsubscribe each month
• Monthly Recurring Revenue, or MRR, i.e. the total amount of cash being generated with subscriptions
• Lifetime revenue per client and Average lifetime of a customer in months

Recommendations

• Calculate your own average revenue per client. You might have several plans, so calculate the average between them for the beginning.
• Ideally, you should know the % of how much MRR each plan generates.
• Keep your eye on all the rows highlighted in blue.
• If you know the CPA for each client, compare it with Lifetime revenue per client and check if the latter is higher.
• If some users upgrade or downgrade between plans, add Expansion and Contraction MRR metrics yourself. It is actually the amount you earned or lost after a user has changed plans and it affects your MRR too.

E-Commerce

The e-commerce business model is based on the idea that you could sell something online. It’s usually pretty straightforward — there is no trial since goods being sold on the web or in mobile apps have a clear value. You purchase a product and get it delivered to your door or by email (e-books for example). However, in most cases, you could make a return.

Examples of e-commerce include Warby Parker, Zappos, and Jet.com.

For an e-commerce model, our assumptions would be the following: we sell 5 products and all of them need to be delivered to clients’ doors. Pricing for each is different, however, sales are evenly distributed. Cost to produce one product is 60% of the price and the other 40% is the margin.

TIP: If you plan to found an e-commerce startup, you need a really healthy margin that will bring velocity to your business. I would suggest you carefully study whether you can sell product with at least a 40% margin before starting.

In the spreadsheet, I include such metrics:

• Number of Sales and Sales growth MoM, %
• Revenue
• Total Cost to produce
• Shipping costs
• Transaction fee, 3% (it really depends, but let’s take this number as it seems like the average in the market)
• Total costs
• Net Margin and Net Income
• Total revenue cumulative and Total Net income cumulative

Recommendations

• Same as before, quickly adjust your numbers, and Excel will take care of the rest.
• Thoroughly think about other expenses such as packaging, and returns, and add costs for your warehouse if applicable.
• Keep your eye on all the rows highlighted in blue.
• If you know your CPA, add it to the Costs model and compare it with Net income to see if you’re actually making money.
• Analyze which product gives you the most sales and adjust your marketing accordingly.

We’ve also added revenue being generated in SaaS and e-commerce models to the Costs spreadsheet, so you can see the Burn rate for these models. The burn rate has changed since you now have some cash flow.

Mixed model

Recently, we saw a big number of success stories with so-called mixed subscription and e-commerce models. You could start a subscription and get physical goods delivered to your door with a certain frequency of your choice — monthly, quarterly, etc.

There’s no trial, but quite often the price for the first order and delivery is either extremely low or just free. It removes a barrier, allowing users to easily give it a try.

Some well-known examples: Dollar Shave Club and Adore Me.

Recommendations

• If you plan to pursue this business model, my Excel template can also help you.
• Think about products as plans and calculate MRR as a key metric.
• Costs and Income should now be considered even more thoroughly since you have to work on two fronts: software and physical goods.

Go ahead and download my template. Don’t forget to take a look at all the recommendations one more time. You could also use this spreadsheet for understanding what your cash flow might look like to grow and plan accordingly from there. I would suggest checking my assumptions in detail and making sure you use numbers inherent to your market.

Good luck and feel free to reach out. Our team at Statsbot is always ready to help with numbers.

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Excel for Startups: Simple Financial Models and Dashboards was originally published in Cube Dev on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Analyzing funnels in an SQL database is not a hard task when you know the right queries. Using SQL language, you can dive into complex funnels and event flow analysis to gain insights into your users’ behavior. In this article, we’re going to tell how we, at Statsbot, use SQL queries for conversion funnel analysis.

Why to build funnels

Funnels are an extremely useful and helpful data tool that can provide you a great overview about your product. In a nutshell, funnels are representing several events your users perform one after another. Calculating how many unique users made each event could show you a conversion rate between each step, so you could actually localize a problem down to a certain stage.

At Statsbot, we measure how many people signed up, connected integration, and used the Scheduled Report feature. Users who performed all these actions are considered as successfully on-board.

Let’s take this process as an example and see how we can actually create this funnel with SQL. The following queries are written for PostgreSQL. You can just copy them and build your funnel right away.

Step 1 — Signup event

In our DB we have a table called Bots. Any user who signed up to Statsbot has a unique ID number and they get added to this table, so bots = users in our case.

In order to get the number of signups, we simply need to choose Bots table, apply the date range we need, and specify the function, which is count.

SELECT count(*)
FROM bots
WHERE created_at BETWEEN ‘2017-05-01’ AND ‘2017-05-31’

We can see now that during this time we got 745 signups.

Step 2 — Calculating Integration connected event

Next, we need to find out how many out of those 745 users connected at least one integration.

In our DB we have a table called “Integrations” that contains an integer value representing how many integrations have been connected by user.

We now need to make a following SQL query to get the result. Note that we are querying a number of integrations connected by users out of those who signed up in May, which we defined in Step 1.

SELECT count(*)
FROM bots
WHERE 
  (SELECT count(*)
  FROM integrations
  WHERE integrations.bot_id = bots.id)>0
  AND created_at BETWEEN ‘2017-05-01’ AND ‘2017-05-31’

Awesome! The result is 104 integrations that had been connected by users who signed up in May.

Step 3 — How many users scheduled at least one report?

Okay, the next step is exactly the same as the previous one. We just add another event from a scheduled_reports section with the same condition to complete this nested query.

SELECT count(*)
FROM bots
WHERE 
   (SELECT count(*)
   FROM integrations
   WHERE integrations.bot_id = bots.id)>0
AND
   (SELECT count(*)
   FROM scheduled_reports
   WHERE scheduled_reports.bot_id = bots.id)>0
AND created_at BETWEEN ‘2017-05-01’ AND ‘2017-05-31’

The result is 61 users have scheduled at least one report.

Step 4 — Putting all pieces together for creating a funnel analysis

This is where the most interesting part comes in. Let’s take all the logic we’ve worked on together and create the conversion funnel — our initial goal.

SELECT count(*) AS Step1,
count(*) FILTER(
  WHERE (
   SELECT count(*)
   FROM integrations
   WHERE integrations.bot_id = bots.id
 ) > 0
) AS Step2,
count(*) FILTER(
  WHERE (
   SELECT count(*)
   FROM integrations
   WHERE integrations.bot_id = bots.id
 ) > 0 and (
   SELECT count(*)
   FROM scheduled_reports
   WHERE scheduled_reports.id = bots.id
 ) > 0
) AS Step3
FROM bots
WHERE created_at BETWEEN '2017-05-01' AND '2017-05-31'

This is what our final result looks like after visualization.

This funnel gives us the insight that we have some problems with onboarding and connecting the first integration. Then, we can make some changes and build the same funnel in one week to measure whether the conversion rate increases or decreases.

Further, we can detect 43 users who connected the data source but didn’t schedule the report yet. They are in churn risk, and we need to get in touch with them quickly to get back on track.

You should also remember one important thing: we created a funnel, which is affected by a slowly changing dimension problem. In our case, users are signed up in May, but at the same time they could add more integrations and schedule more reports during their customer life cycle. This might result in changes to the numbers in Step 2 and Step 3.

If you have an event based system, then a slowly changing dimension problem can be eliminated. For example, we use Mixpanel to build the same funnel this way:

SELECT
  COUNT(
  DISTINCT CASE WHEN cur_signup_time IS NOT NULL
    THEN distinct_id END
  ) Step1,
  COUNT(
  DISTINCT CASE WHEN cur_signup_time IS NOT NULL AND cur_int_time IS NOT NULL
    THEN distinct_id END
  ) Step2,
  COUNT(
  DISTINCT CASE WHEN
    cur_signup_time IS NOT NULL AND cur_int_time IS NOT NULL AND cur_new_schedule_time IS NOT NULL
    THEN distinct_id END
  ) Step3
FROM (
       SELECT
         distinct_id,
         "time",
         COALESCE(signup_time,
                  LAG(signup_time) IGNORE NULLS OVER(PARTITION BY distinct_id
                  ORDER BY time)
         ) cur_signup_time,
         COALESCE(int_time,
                  LAG(int_time) IGNORE NULLS OVER(PARTITION BY distinct_id
                  ORDER BY time)
         ) cur_int_time,
         COALESCE(new_schedule_time,
                  LAG(new_schedule_time) IGNORE NULLS OVER(PARTITION BY distinct_id
                  ORDER BY time)
         ) cur_new_schedule_time
       FROM
         (
           SELECT
             "time",
             distinct_id,
             (CASE WHEN event = 'Signup'
               THEN time END) signup_time,
             (CASE WHEN event = 'Integration connected'
               THEN time END) int_time,
             (CASE WHEN event = 'New Schedule'
               THEN time END) new_schedule_time
           FROM mixpanel.mixpanel_export
           WHERE "time" > '2016-05-01' AND "time" < '2017-01-01'
           ORDER BY distinct_id, "time"
         ) event_times
       ORDER BY distinct_id, "time"
     ) event_windows

These 4 steps are easy to follow to build your first funnel in SQL. We hope this will be a good start to customizing your analysis with SQL power!

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Decreasing churn rate is the way to increase revenue in SaaS business. When some of the customers churn, a product or customer success manager starts an investigation, connecting them by email and asking for feedback. Such dunning management can take tons of time, whereas the reason can be just a failed charge.

At the early stage of building Statsbot, we came up with a solution to the question of how to automate failed charges in 2 hours.

As a result, we reduced churn due to failed charges by nearly 27%.

In this post we share our experience and results in churn management.

What we did wrong

Imagine, one of the most active teams utilizes Statsbot for several months. They actively use all key features and chat with our support quite often. We’ve even shipped a new useful feature 5 days ago which they were asking for. And all of a sudden, we receive a notification that this team has just cancelled their subscription!

The first question that comes to our mind at this moment is: “What did we do wrong?”

Once we reached the client, it was discovered that the card they left on a profile has expired. Phew… move on. The team quickly replaced the expired card with a new one to keep their subscription.

The second question that grilled us pretty hard was “How many clients have we lost due to failed charges last month?”

The results shocked us. 30% of all churned users were gone due to expired cards.

We definitely knew that Stripe failed charges exist, and we had faced them before as users, but that was the first time we were on the other side. And the only thing we did wrong was not finding the issue sooner. We started to seek a solution for churn management.

Stripe + Intercom Solution

We use Stripe for our payment processing, and Intercom to provide support and onboarding for the clients. The integration of these two tools seemed to be the best solution to reduce the customer churn rate.

Step 1

Sometimes Stripe can’t charge a client’s card. The reasons could be that the card is expired, the amount we try to charge is higher than the limit set by the bank or client , or the card is reported stolen. In such situations, Stripe makes some additional attempts based on your configured settings.

In our case, Stripe makes the first attempt on the renewal date and if it fails, there are three more attempts — once a day for the next three days.

Step 2

Since we have already used Intercom, which has integration with Stripe, it was rational to utilize it for our failed charges issue.

Intercom automatically syncs events from Stripe in the form of attributes, and lets you create a campaign based on the filters you could apply with these attributes. Currently, there are decent amount of attributes available right away without a need to configure anything.

We quickly configured a custom attribute and called it stripe_failed_charge_last_occured_at. It actually allows us to catch the last failed attempt for certain users and immediately makes it visible in Intercom.

Step 3

Setting up a campaign was an easy task.

We applied the rule “Stripe_failed_charge_last_occurred_at exactly 0 days ago” and the goal for the campaign called “charged is triggered.” When we get a failed payment in Stripe, the user enters our email campaign in Intercom. Once one of our attempts to process the payment is successful, the user will exit from the campaign.

There are two emails that we send to users who enter the failed charges campaign:

• The first email is sent after Stripe gets a failed charge event. It contains a note that we couldn’t process the payment, advice to get in touch with the card issuer, and instructions on how to update billing info at Statsbot.

• If our further attempts to charge the client keep failing, then Intercom automatically sends the second email two days after the first one. This email informs the client that we will make a final attempt to process the payment before our service will be suspended.

If you are curious about how we configured a 2 day interval between those emails, you might take a look at the screenshot below. Intercom allows you to choose an interval in an easy way.

This churn reduction campaign on the whole reduced our churn due to failed charges by 27%.

At Statsbot, we love getting results by leveraging tools we already have, with the smallest possible time investments from our side. This easy solution took us only 2 hours, and it continues to bring us positive results. We hope our experience can be useful for your SaaS business as well.

UPD:

Thanks to Shoffner we’ve found that according to Intercom’s setup, if users will enter and leave campaign after successful charge they won’t be able to re-enter it again. A workaround in this case could be either initiating a new conversation with client via Intercom API or simply removing campaign goal which is Charged triggered.

Intercom and Stripe are a couple of our most favorite tools. We even integrated Statsbot with Stripe to make your analytics easier for metrics like MRR, Net Revenue, Trials, etc. Check it out:

Stripe Integration: Your Company’s Financial Metrics in Slack

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During my winter break in Kazakhstan on December 2016, I’ve met with my old friend Kana Beisekeyev — professional filmmaker and photographer.

After chatting about how our things were going, I’ve proposed Kana to create his website together since he significantly updated his portfolio with new amazing documentary projects. Plus his old website was designed with the aim to show portrait photos and Kana is now focused on filmmaking his website needed to get updated for different goal.

Also Kana wanted to start selling some of his photo series as framed posters, so he can spread a word about Kazakhstan even more and get additional income source.

We’ve decided to keep our motivational momentum and start the next day.

Goals

Before starting we set the following goals:

• website has to be mobile friendly
• design should be simple and focused on emphasizing documentary projects
• fully operating store with framed posters
• finish in 8 hours (as you’ve already understood from the title, we failed with this one and finished in 12 hours 🙂)

I was responsible for choosing a platform, taking care of all technical parts and setting up the store while Kana was responsible for creating content and text. Finally, we’ve decided that we will work on design together.

Choosing a platform

There are many platforms for creating website, but whenever your case is related to e-commerce, the alpha dog here is Shopify. It provides you whatever you need to run a successful e-commerce store, so you don’t need to worry about so many things.

Moreover, Shopify Support is operating 24/7 with people called Shopify Gurus ready to help you in a chat straight away. I was constantly addressing different questions to them and live support accelerated our process significantly.

At the end we both realized that choosing Shopify was a right move and actually we achieved our goals mainly because of that very first decision.

Design

In order to reach our goal of emphasizing documentary projects we’ve decided to demonstrate them using “cinema posters style” images. They are large, eye-catching and clearly transfer the meaning.

Once we got understanding with images and concept, it is time to choose a theme. There are plenty of Shopify themes you can use in your store and it is important to pick one that fits best into your needs. It is well worth spending some time studying themes beforehand.

We’ve chosen Boundless theme. It is simple, mobile friendly and has “single product gallery to feature large, high-resolution images”. Perfectly fits into our goals!

Moreover, this theme is free, so we could try without spending money.

Setting up documentary portfolio

Here comes the interesting part. I knew that our task of creating portfolio + store website is not standard, so we might face some customization problems.

Recently, I graduated from Make School Summer Academy in San Francisco where I learned iOs programming. What I’ve learned the best during my summer is that you don’t have to be afraid to fail and don’t need to keep thinking about the problem itself. All you have to do is to make baby steps or “eat elephant one bite at a time”, as I sometimes imagine. This approach is extremely helpful and can be used in almost every situation when you face with the problem.

So, once we started working on creating portfolio, we found that you can actually upload every documentary project as a product on Shopify and every product obviously has its price and “add to cart button”.

It looked the following way on the homepage:

If you press on a image you will open product page:

At this point I’ve started worrying about whether these problems can be solved on Shopify and we are not limited technically by platform. One of Shopify Gurus explained me that we can customize our theme by digging into code which is mix of HTML, CSS, Javascript and Liquid template language.

I have to admit that I have a small experience with these languages and had actually never seen Liquid before, so was a little bit uncomfortable proceeding further.

What can help you in these kind of cases is resourcefulness.

So, several google requests , searching for a code we need in order to remove price from homepage, asking for advice and help from friend Roma (thanks again!) and we are done.

We simply commented some part of product-grid-item.liquid file, so it looks the following:

Removing price and add to cart button from product page was a little bit more difficult task to accomplish because we need to remove both from documentary projects, but enable for our future store with framed posters. Moreover, we had to add quantity selector for store if customers would like to purchase several posters.

We figured it out by assigning all documentary projects (they are set as products on Shopify) as “Sold out” with price $0 in our admin panel. Then we modified code in product-template.liquid file with the following logic.

If product price is more than $0 then enable quantity selector, and if product is available then show price and “add to cart” button on product page.

Thus, we are done with setting up documentary portfolio and it’s now time to move on to the next task.

Setting up a store

For selling framed posters we would need a company who can print, frame, pack and ship orders to clients worldwide. We’ve chosen Printful and it was super easy to integrate in our store (check Shopify App Store if you are still in doubt about what platform to choose and need to find more about potential opportunities for your store. There are many apps that will save you a ton of time and help to boost your business).

Printful has a tool called Mockup Generator that saves you enormous amount of time and shows you how your product exactly will look like.

We used Mockup Generator and synced all images for sale, set sizes for framed posters and prices. It is also good that Printful pays attention to details and gives merchants opportunity to include add-ins such as business card, flyer or sticker into orders, but it will cost you additional fee.

There is still some level of customization you can make for free though. You can upload your logo which will be used as a branding sticker for your orders.

Posters section was looking really good and we enjoyed the process of creating it. Take a look on the image below.

Few polishing things

We have connected PayPal with a couple of clicks and now ready to accept payments.

Then, we had to create Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. This part was always a nightmare for me and I really hate to deal with all these legal documents.

Luckily, Shopify has free generators for both Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions. It is cool, isn’t it?

It doesn’t mean though that generated documents will perfectly fit in every case, but you can always tailor it according to your needs later, but as of for starting quickly it is exactly what we needed.

Lastly, we set domain in our setting and the store is launched.

Final result

We were extremely happy to reach all our goals, and you remember that we aimed to create mobile friendly website, right? So, here is how it looks like on mobile device.

We really enjoyed the process and were so happy to launch!

Visit Kana’s website at beisekeyev.com, we hope you will love it ❤️

If you are thinking about starting e-commerce business, choose Shopify and you will be excited about how advanced the platform is.

There are plenty of other great features such as Dashboards, Discounts, Shopify Payments and Sales Channels that I didn’t have a chance to write about.

However, if you will need more information or need help with setting up a store on Shopify, feel free to reach me out.

Thank you for reading and press 💚 if you liked this post — this gives me motivation to keep sharing my experience 😊

Поговорив о том как идут наши дела, я предложил Канату вместе создать с нуля его персональный сайт, так как он значительно обновил свое портфолио новыми документальными фильмами. К тому же, его старый веб-сайт был нацелен на демонстрацию портретных фото, поэтому требовалось сделать обновление сайта с прицелом на демонстрацию фильмов, в первую очередь.

Также, Канат хотел бы начать продавать серии своих фотографии в виде постеров так, чтобы иметь еще один способ рассказывать о себе, Казахстане и иметь дополнительный источник дохода.

Мы решили не терять наш мотивационный импульс и начать на следующий же день.

Цели

Перед тем как начать, мы поставили следующие цели:

• веб-сайт должен быть адаптирован для просмотра на смартфонах
• дизайн должен быть простым и акцентирован на документальные проекты
• мы должны сделать полностью функционирующий магазин на веб-сайте
• закончить за 8 часов (как вы уже поняли из заголовка, тут мы не справились и закончили за 12 часов 🙂)

Я отвечал за выбор платформы, работу с технической частью и создание магазина, в то время как Канат должен был создать контент и текст для сайта. Дизайн сайта оставался общей обязанностью.

Выбор платформы

Сейчас очень много платформ для создания веб-сайта, но когда дело доходит до e-commerce, то безусловный лидер здесь Shopify. Эта платформа предоставляет вам все, что необходимо для успешного функционирования интернет-магазина, и вам не надо беспокоиться об очень многих вещах.

К тому же есть отдел поддержки Shopify, работающий 24/7 и готовый помочь вам в чате практически сразу же (чат поддерживается людьми, которых называют Shopify Guru и функционирует он только на английском языке, но базового английского будет вполне достаточно для коммуникации).

Во время создания сайта я очень часто писал в чат поддержки и, благодаря быстрой помощи с их стороны, мы значительно смогли ускорить наш процесс.

В конце мы оба осознали, что выбор платформы мы сделали правильный и мы смогли достичь результата во многом именно из-за этого первого принятого решения.

Дизайн

Для того, чтобы наша цель акцентировать внимание на документальные работы была достигнута, мы решили отображать их в стиле постеров к фильмам, которые вы привыкли видеть в кинотеатрах. Они большие, притягивают внимание и четко передают смысл.

Как только у нас появилось понимание с изображениями и концепцией, наступило время выбирать тему для сайта. Темы в Shopify есть не что иное, как готовый шаблон дизайна, который вы можете установить и сразу же использовать на вашем сайте.

Выбор тем достаточно широкий и очень важно выбрать ту, которая больше всего удовлетворяет вашим потребностям. Стоит уделить некоторое время для изучения тем заранее.

Мы выбрали тему, которая называется Boundless. Дизайн темы простой, полностью адаптирован для просмотра на смартфоне и содержит “галерею единичных продуктов для показа больших изображений с высоким разрешением”. Идеально подходит для наших целей!

К тому же эта тема бесплатная, поэтому мы могли поэкспериментировать, не тратя деньги сразу.

Создание портфолио с документальными фильмами

Тут наступает интересная часть. Я знал, что наша задача создания сайта с портфолио и магазином нестандартная, поэтому мы возможно столкнемся с проблемами кастомизации.

Недавно, я стал выпускником Make School в Сан-Франциско, где я изучал программирование для iOs приложений на протяжении всего лета 2016 года. Один из уроков, что я там получил, состоит в том, что не надо бояться сделать ошибку (в программировании ошибки и баги постоянны), и не надо постоянно сидеть и думать только о самой проблеме. Все, что тебе надо делать, это “ступать детскими шажочками” или “съесть слона по кусочкам”, как я сам себе иногда представляю. Этот подход чрезвычайно полезен и его можно использовать практически в любой ситуации, когда вы сталкиваетесь с некой проблемой.

Итак, вернемся к нашему рассказу. Как только мы начали работу над созданием портфолио мы обнаружили, что можем загрузить каждый документальный проект только как товар и каждый товар на Shopify, естественно, имеет свою цену и кнопку “Добавить в корзину”.

На главной странице это выглядело следующим образом:

Если нажать на изображение, то вы попадаете на страницу фильма:

На данном этапе я стал беспокоиться о том, есть ли возможность исправить эти проблемы и мы не ограничены платформой в техническом плане. Один из Shopify Guru в чате объяснил, что есть возможность подправить дизайн темы под себя, покопавшись в коде, который состоит из микса HTML, CSS, Javascript и языка Liquid.

Я должен признать, что у меня очень небольшой опыт работы с этими языками, а Liquid я вообще до этого не видел, поэтому чувствовал себя немного некомфортно.

Как уже сказал выше, тут главное не бояться и немного проявить находчивость.

Итак, пару поисковых запросов в Google, самостоятельный поиск части кода, в котором нам надо поработать, чтобы убрать цену с главной страницы, просьба о совете и помощи у друга Ромы (спасибо еще раз) и все готово.

Мы просто закомментировали некоторую часть кода в файле, который называется product-grid-item.liquid так, чтобы выглядело это следующим образом:

Убрать цену и кнопку “Добавить в корзину” из страницы товара была задача посложнее, потому что нужно было убрать их из всех документальных проектов, но при этом оставить возможность использовать в нашем будущем магазине. Более того, нужно было оставить селектор количества товара в магазине, если клиенты захотят купить несколько постеров с одинаковым изображением.

Вопрос решился установлением цены в $0 на все документальные фильмы (в качестве напоминания, фильмы у нас заданы в Shopify как товары) и тэга “Распродано” в нашей панели администратора. Затем мы модифицировали код в файле product-template.liquid с последующей логикой: если цена на товар больше $0, тогда пусть отображается селектор количества товара, и если товар доступен (читай не с тэгом “Распродано”), тогда пусть отображается цена и кнопка “Добавить в корзину”.

На этом мы закончили с созданием портфолио и теперь переходим к следующей задаче.

Создание магазина с постерами

Для того, чтобы мы могли продавать постеры, нам нужна была компания, которая бы печатала, обрамляла, паковала и отправляла заказы по всему миру для будущих клиентов. Мы выбрали Printful и интеграция была супер простой (если вы до сих пор сомневаетесь какую платформу выбрать для своего будущего интернет-магазина, зайдите на Shopify App store, чтобы понять потенциальные возможности вашего магазина. Там можно найти много полезных приложений, которые сэкономят вам кучу времени и помогут ускорить развитие бизнеса).

У Printful есть инструмент Mockup Generator, который невероятно удобен для создания и точного отображения ваших товаров.

Мы использовали Mockup Generator и синхронизировали все изображения, установили размеры на постеры, проставили цены. Также Printful приятно удивил своим вниманием к деталям. Можно за дополнительную плату вкладывать вашу визитку, флайер, стикер к каждому заказу.

Тем не менее, есть некоторые услуги, которые можно получить бесплатно, например, ваш логотип небольшого формата может быть приклеен в виде стикера к каждому оформленному заказу.

Часть сайта с постерами выглядела очень круто и мы сами получили удовольствие от ее создания. Посмотрите, что получилось ниже.

Несколько финальных штрихов

Дело осталось за малым. Мы в пару кликов подключили PayPal для принятия платежей. Супер просто.

Далее, у любого уважающего себя магазина есть “Политика конфиденциальности” и “Условия и Положения”. Для меня эти вещи всегда были ночным кошмаром, так как я не юрист и мне всегда очень тяжело разбираться с такими вещами.

Благо, на Shopify есть бесплатные генераторы и для “Политики конфиденциальности”, и для “Условии и Положении”, правда только на английском языке, но это подходит для нашего случая — сайт для международной аудитории.

Наличие генераторов не означает, что документы идеально подойдут для каждого интернет-магазина, но я считаю, что это все равно круто и сильно облегчает жизнь на начальном этапе.

Наконец, мы подключили домен и наш сайт с интернет-магазином запущен!

Финальный результат

Мы были очень рады достичь всех целей, которые сами перед собой поставили. Вы же помните, что одна из наших целей — это создание сайта, адаптированного для просмотра на смартфонах?

Вот как сайт выглядит на смартфоне:

Довольные после запуска сайта.

Зайдите и посмотрите, что у нас получилось на beisekeyev.com и мы надеемся, что вам понравится ❤️

Если вы думаете о том, чтобы создать интернет-магазин, выбирайте Shopify и вы будете удивлены сколько у вас появится возможностей для реализации.

На Shopify есть куча других очень продвинутых функций, как Статистика, Скидки и Купоны, Каналы Продаж, о которых я не мог рассказать здесь.

Но 17 января, во вторник, c 19:00 до 21:00, я буду проводить семинар на террасе Angel-in-us в Mega Park, где расскажу о платформе более подробно и смогу ответить на дополнительные вопросы.

Пройдите по ссылке ниже, зарегистрируйтесь и приходите, будет познавательно, интересно и вкусно.

meetup.kz

Спасибо, что дочитали до конца, пожалуйста, оставляйте свои комментарии, подписывайтесь на мой блог и нажимайте на 💚 — это дает мне мотивацию делиться своим опытом 😊

Recently, I’ve started conducting case studies and researches for products I personally use and love. This is interesting and beneficial activity that I think helps me in three ways. First, it is always interesting to get deeper into product details and think how you would solve their problems. Second, it helps me to improve myself and grow in terms of being better Product Manager. Last but not least, I send my case studies to these teams hoping I contribute my efforts in order to make products better.

This analysis is about Udacity mobile app.

I am not related to Udacity in any way. This research is done by me voluntarily to find out how Udacity mobile app can be improved.

I am using Udacity app and find it extremely useful and beneficial. Content is great, so I want to enroll in almost every course. I know that Udacity is a desktop first, however, clients who use both desktop and mobile are less likely to leave. Thus said, mobile is important for Udacity. Taking into account facts above and my experience which is mostly in mobile, I’ve decided to make this small project.

Udacity’s mission is to bring accessible, affordable, engaging, and highly effective higher education to the world.

Courses in Udacity are easily accessible, a lot of them are free and Nanodegree programs are far more affordable than tuition fees in traditional universities. Moreover, leading experts and companies participating in courses provide very effective and engaging content.

Taking into account that tremendous works is being done in all aspects of Udacity’s mission, I want to focus on aspects that I can contribute to. So, my aim here is to propose design improvements and features that can bring user re-engagement. I believe that re-engagement is important for Udacity, its mission and students to built a habit of lifelong education process.

Suggestions

1. Subtitles in video

I’ve read reviews in Google Play, and found that a lot of students requests this feature (that’s why we start with this suggestion). I’ve also found that Udacity recommends to turn subtitles on in YouTube player, which is not convenient (I couldn’t turn subtitles on as well).

Probably there are some technical restrictions that prevent Udacity to implement this feature. I believe that solving this problem will be a great help for international students as well as it is aligned with Udacity’s mission to give accessible education.

2. Continue from where you stopped

I assume, that people are most likely using Udacity mobile app on the go, when travel, taking bus/train and etc. Hence, students can often close and launch app again. Currently it is very difficult to come back and find the moment you stopped at. Below is my suggestion how it might look like in order to meet this user need.

3. Progress bar for video

Below is how list of videos in course look like. It is a bit confusing to understand which video was played till the end and which wasn’t.

My suggestion is to implement progress bar, so it can look something like on the following screen.

Progress bar solves two problems:

• student can come back and finish watching videos that were intentionally skipped before by some reason
• student can easily identify last video that she didn’t finish watching

4. Ambiguity with video download button

It is a cool feature that helped me to go through Product design course while going to San Francisco on Caltrain :) There is small ambiguity for users with the download button. Once video is downloaded, you can press that round button with the line and it will be changed to download button again. So, you might download video twice which is not a desired case. Easy fix is represented on the following screen.

5. Add video to favorites

This one is the easiest to propose. Nice and simple feature for coming back and watch videos you are interested the most.

User re-engagement

1. Statistics and personalization.

I was using Treehouse desktop and mobile app when preparing for my coding bootcamp this summer. One thing that always made me come back and push forward was my personal statistics. I think it is a really cool feature for user re-engagement. Here is how it might look like in Udacity mobile app.

On the one hand, blue line and minimum points to be reached can be in conflict with Udacity’s approach of letting students work on their own pace. On the other hand, it shows to students how much has been already invested, so they might prefer to stay and use Udacity longer, clearly seeing their time investment.

2. Reward system

Gained points can be turned into credits that will give discount for Nanodegree program. Reward system might encourage students to learn more and actually finish courses which is a goal both for Udacity and students. Lastly, most effective students will be involved in lifelong education process with subjects they choose themselves. It will be a great habit!

3. Give a challenge to solve

Hacker Rank is a very interesting example of this call-to-action factor. They constantly send emails encouraging users to come and solve technical problems. Some of my friends get hired in top e-commerce companies participating in these challenges.

I understand that Udacity don’t want to be that kind of platform where people are solving tasks. Udacity’s main focus is education, so notifications can be send individually to students encouraging them to finish particular course or take additional quiz/challenge to improve their skills.

Summary

In conclusion, Udacity is doing a great job democratizing education. I believe that a lot of students understand how effective the product is and don’t have problems with motivation to take and finish courses. However, features I’ve described above might help to decrease churn rate, increase re-engagement, let those who is less motivated actually finish courses and bring better user experience for all students.

Special thanks for reading draft of this post and giving feedback:

• Paul Lopushinsky
• Nick Ivanecky
• Ilya Matvienko

Thanks for reading, feel free to response and press 💙 if you liked this post.

You might also like following posts:

• Analysis on Spotify and its partnerships
• WhatsApp analysis: identifying user pain points and how it can be solved

My Thoughts On Improving Udacity Mobile App was originally published in ProductHired Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, I’ve started conducting case studies and researches for products I personally use and love. This is interesting and beneficial activity that I think helps me in three ways. First, it is always interesting to get deeper into product details and think how you would solve their problems. Second, it helps me to improve myself and grow in terms of being better Product Manager. Last but not least, I send my case studies to these teams hoping I contribute my efforts in order to make products better.

This analysis is about Spotify — one of my favorite products.

*I am not related to Spotify in any way. This research is done by me voluntarily to find out how Spotify can be improved.

What is Spotify?

Spotify is a cross-platform music streaming service from Sweden. Service allows users to search for music, listen, get recommendations based on what you have listened before as well as to discover what music your friends listen to.

Spotify’s mission is: Give people access to all the music they want all the time — in a completely legal and accessible way.

Following this mission, Spotify approaches to a 100 million active users base out of which 30 million are paying subscribers.

Spotify’s target audience

Let’s take a look on what images company uses in social media accounts and website to understand target audience.

So, as you can see from screenshots above, Spotify obviously targets:

• Young people
• Who love outdoor activities
• Who love to socialize with friends

Potential partnerships

Spotify already formed number of different partnerships (we will take a closer look on this below) in order to build stronger relationships with users providing easy access to music and increase engagement as a result. Let’s break down which platforms are potentially interesting for Spotify and its users, as well as how Spotify can assess potential partnerships.

What platforms do millennials use?

In order to give answer to this question, I’ve decided to narrow down my scope within U.S. market. This is done for two reasons:

• U.S. is the biggest music market, hence it is highly important for Spotify
• Most comprehensive and reliable data that can be found is also about U.S. market

According to Nielsen 2015 Music U.S. Report following platforms are the most popular in US.

• Radio — 93%
• TV — 85%
• Smartphones — 74%
• PC’s — 50%
• TV connected devices — 40%
• Tablets — 29%

We can make a conclusion that Radio and TV are the main platforms for Spotify to be, in order to compete with other players and fulfill mission of providing music in accessible way to users. Spotify already has presence in Smartphones, PC’s and Tablets, so lets take a closer look on Radio and TV.

Radio

Here is information about how Millennials listen to radio in U.S. according to Nielsen research on Audio.

Quite predictably, people listen to radio mostly out of home and “the top daypart is PM drive”. So radio in a car looks like a good candidate for disruption.

TV

TV is on the second place in terms of reaching people in U.S. after radio, but the most heavily consumed. Take a look on chart below from another research conducted by Nielsen.

Despite that Millennials spent less time watching TV comparing to other adults, it seems to be a good place for growth and partnerships both with TV set producers and TV-connected devices due to high level of time spent on these platforms.

SWOT for Partnerships

Recently, Spotify’s CMO Seth Farbman said that it is crucial to stay focused and not get distracted by all of the opportunities to partner and go somewhere else.

Hence, Spotify might need to strategically focus on platform and brands their target audience currently already use and love.

One of the models that can be used to evaluate a potential partnership is SWOT analysis. Below is my attempt to reproduce questions in terms of this model.

Landscape for music streaming services and partnerships

Partnerships in music streaming market are common and competition is high.

Spotify is a leader in terms of partnerships and presents in almost every platform where users can listen to music. Apple Music hasn’t yet formed many partnerships and grow thanks to millions of existing Apple users. Other competitors are slowly catching up.

Companies form partnerships in order to accelerate process of reaching their goals. Goals, in broad terms, usually fall into two categories: product expansion(in areas outside of core competencies) or distribution. Alliances are formed not only to be beneficial for partners, but also for their customers.

To sum up with this section and conclude why Spotify form partnerships, I have three assumptions to answer:

1. Distribution. New users acquisition which in future will turn to paying subscribers.
2. Increasing conversion. Existing users who haven’t yet turned into paying subscribers see growing value of having premium account (e.g. only premium subscribers can use Spotify in Uber) and they finally convert.
3. Decreasing churn rate. The more platforms customer will use to listen to Spotify, the less likely (s)he will leave.

Lastly, it is also worth to mention that Spotify smartly focused on use cases (e.g. people listen to music in a car, airplane, etc) when forms partnerships.

Idea to build: Spotify instead of traditional radio in cars

Since, Spotify’s goal is to provide easy access to music for its users and car is a great place for this aim, lets focus on that topic further down.

How Spotify can be there and most importantly what Spotify can do in order to be chosen by user instead of a radio stations?

In the long term, ideal scenario seems to me as forming new user habit. When you about to start driving a car, you think about turning on Spotify for music instead of radio.

How Spotify can start forming this habit?

Lets break down this question through Nir Eyal’s Hook Model (Trigger, Action, Reward, Investment).

We will not focus on a car as a platform where Spotify is already installed or can be installed, but on a car itself as a place where people listen to music. It is done by two reasons.

• Average age of cars in U.S. is 11.5 years old, thus I presume most of cars don’t have a technical capacity for Spotify app installed in Audio system
• Whereas around 85% of millennials in U.S. own smartphone and it can be used to listen to music in a car

Trigger

External triggers — ads, word of mouth, different marketing campaigns.

Internal triggers — wish to listen to music in a car.

Nir says that the success secret here is to couple external trigger with internal trigger as closer as possible. Taking that into account, one of the ideas to test and measure is sending push notifications when:

• Changing geolocation with the speed inherent to a car (but sending push notification only during intervals for safety reasons)
• Several minutes before most probable start of drive (i.e. identify most frequent drive time slot for user and send him/her push-notification)

Action

Spotify is a very user friendly app in terms of action (2–3 actions to start listening to music), so we won’t stop here for long.

Reward

Rewards of the Hunt — discovering new tracks through Recommendations, Discover Weekly and Genres & Moods.

Investment

Users primarily invest in building playlists and own music library. The more you invest, the better Spotify gets for user. In other words, the more tracks you save, the better your Discover Weekly experience.

Summary

Being represented in different platforms with aim to form closer and stable relationships with users is a great goal for Spotify. It will bring more engagement, positively affect business metrics and conversion to paid subscribers rate, become stronger habit-forming product and delight its users.

Special thanks for reading draft of this post and giving feedback:

• Jessica Johnson
• Nick Ivanecky
• Ilya Matvienko

Thanks for reading, feel free to response and press 💙 if you liked this post

• I am not related to Spotify in any way. This research is done by me voluntarily to find out how Spotify can be improved.

You might also like the following posts:

• WhatsApp analysis: identifying user pain points and how it can be solved
• My Thoughts On Improving Udacity Mobile App

Analysis On Spotify and Its Partnerships was originally published in ProductHired Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Recently, I’ve started conducting analysis for products I personally use and love. This is interesting and beneficial activity that I think helps me in three ways. First, it is always interesting to get deeper into product details, listen to its users and think how you would solve their problems. Second, it helps me to improve myself and grow in terms of being better Product Manager. Last but not least, I send my case studies to these teams hoping I contribute my efforts in order to make products better.

This post is about WhatsApp — mobile app I use everyday to stay connected with my friends and family.

*I am not related to WhatsApp in any way. This research is done by me voluntarily as attempt to find out how WhatsApp can be improved.

Objective

• Identify user’s pain points, understand their needs and propose solutions

Target audience

• 15 respondents who are my friends and active WhatsApp users. They are working professionals, age 25–35 years old and all iPhone users

WhatsApp’s mission

Company’s mission is: ensuring that anyone could stay in touch with family and friends anywhere on the planet, without costs or gimmicks standing in the way.

User Feedback

Question asked: “Please tell what brings you annoyance using WhatsApp on your phone”

Below are user feedbacks gathered by me.

Each pain point is colored differently according to frequency of received complaints.

The brighter red — the higher number of complaints.

How I would prioritize

Below is my chart on how I would prioritize issues based on the information I currently have. There are only two categories.

• Issue is important for user
• Issue is important for WhatsApp in terms of its mission and vision

Now, lets dive into more details about each pain point.

No video call feature

User Feedback

• “I wish there would be FaceTime in WhatsApp…’’ (Video calls and FaceTime are synonyms for a lot of users who participated)

Reasons for issue

• Users switch to FaceTime for video calls whereas WhatsApp is their preferred communication tool

Suggestion

Video calls were mentioned often during research. One of the most interesting problems here how UI/UX can be implemented in a simple and accessible way.

Conclusion

Many WhatsApp competitors have video calls and it seems to me a high-priority task for the team . Launch of video calls will help keeping WhatsApp users connected with their families and friends with additional feature, and as result increase key metrics such as retention and engagement.

Can’t search in chat

User Feedback

• “There is no chance to search in chat. I wish I can search by name, keyword and etc’’

Reasons for issue

Users don’t know that there is app-wide search feature in WhatsApp. I have three assumptions here on what might cause problem:

• users don’t see search field which is in the top of chats lists
• users see search field, but presume it is only for chat name’s search
• users want to search only when they are in particular chat and since search field is not there now, they don’t know search feature exists

Suggestion

The best thing to do here is to test these assumptions to find out which one is the source of user problem.

Conclusion

This was frequently addressed complaint, thus I gave it a high priority. What seems to be a reasonable fix (I might be not right though) is to place search field in the top of every chat as well.

Phone button is too close to profile picture*

*I’ve conducted this research on 14th September and WhatsApp fixed this issue with update released on 19th October with a slightly different implementation.

User Feedback

• “Phone button is placed too close to profile picture. It is evil’’

Reasons for issue

• User wants to tap on profile picture but initiates WhatsApp calling instead

Suggestion

I would propose to place profile picture next to name. Thus, phone button issue can be solved as well as picture next to name seems more organic*

*Above I suggest changes only in private chats and it would be bad solution for group chats where names of chat members are displayed. WhatsApp recently released with solution that is good both for private and group chats — image is placed slightly to the left, not in the center

Conclusion

Issue is highly-prioritized because a lot of respondents experience annoyance with this button and it is quick fix for WhatsApp. Hence, a lot of users will be happier and not much resources would be spend to fix it.

Can’t select all media files in chat and then delete them

User Feedback

• “It is annoying that I can’t delete all received media files in chat at once and have to select them one by one’’

Reasons for issue

• In order to get some free memory space users want to delete files in their chats and spend a lot of time selecting them one by one

Suggestion

Here is how solution can look like.

Conclusion

Taking into account that there are a lot of complaints about this issue I assume it is high priority for users and an old pain point. Proposed suggestion seems to be aligned with WhatsApp’s vision to keep things simple.

Can’t open profile picture of person in group chat who is not in my contact list

User Feedback

• “In order to do that I have to choose «Message + xxx xxx», open chat and tap on profile picture”

Reasons for issue

• It is always curious to see profile picture of people you don’t know. This can be done easily if person is in your contact list. However, I presume that fixing this issue by removing “barrier” between people who are not in your contact lists would require painful changes in code because phone number is user’s login in WhatsApp

Suggestion

Nevertheless, I would recommend solution that you can see below.

Conclusion

This was described by respondents as an old pain point as well. Resolving this issue might bring better user experience and smoother communication in group chat.

WhatsApp calling interrupts when I get another call

User Feedback

• “I don’t know why call on mobile is prioritized over the conversation I am already having in WhatsApp’’

Reasons for issue

• Obvious reason — user is forced to be interrupted

Conclusion

I presume that there is technical restriction from Apple that prevents to simply resolve this issue. This issue is clearly a room for improvement and a nice problem to solve in order to give users ability to easily communicate which is WhatsApp’s primary goal. If it is out of WhatsApp’s team control, then there are yet no way to relieve this pain point.

Starred messages are saved only in chats they belong to

User Feedback

• “I wish I have access to all starred messages in one place. I often don’t remember in which chat I saved it’’

Reasons for issue

• Difficult access to starred messages as well as a need to memorize chat where this particular message was starred

Suggestion

• There is already Favorites section in the app which might be appropriate place for Starred messages. User can switch between contacts and messages on the top of the screen

Conclusion

There were number of complaints about this issue and it can be a nice improvement for users. However, I would give low priority for users and WhatsApp because I assume that people don’t often save messages in chat. It would be great to find out some stats on how often users save messages in private and group chats.

WhatsApp calling is too fast

User Feedback

“Dial is so fast, I don’t have time to cancel it’’

Reasons for issue

This was one of the most interesting findings. Initially, I thought it is related to issue about small distance between profile picture and phone button.

However, respondents told it is a different case. Reasons I found are following:

• user changed his mind after pressing phone button and wanted to cancel, but call was already initiated
• user was scrolling down in Calls section and accidentally launched call

Suggestion

Throw alert (e.g. «Are you sure you want to dial now?») before calling for those users who has chosen to set up this kind of alert.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that a lot of users addressed this issue, it doesn’t seem to me as a problem or disadvantage for WhatsApp. Increasing connection time will negatively affect team (tremendous effort contributed for this feature) and other users (who love this speedy call).

Summary

To sum it up, WhatsApp is a great app that meets user needs for communication in easy way and without any costs. Some proposed features can be added in order to bring even better user experience. Video call feature is what currently WhatsApp doesn’t have, but I am sure this will be implemented very soon because it seems an important part to company’s mission and vision.

Special thanks for reading draft of this post and giving feedback:

• Jessica Johnson
• Nick Ivanecky
• Ilya Matvienko
• Aigerim Shorman

Thanks for reading, feel free to response and press 💙 if you liked this post

*I am not related to WhatsApp in any way. This research is done by me voluntarily as attempt to find out how WhatsApp can be improved.

You might also like following posts:

• Analysis on Spotify and its potential partnerships
• My Thoughts On Improving Udacity Mobile App

WhatsApp Analysis: Identifying User Pain Points and How It Can Be Solved was originally published in ProductHired Blog on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.