My app analytics process - how i use data to improve my apps (showing you real numbers 👀)

Intro / what we are covering today :) welcome to the video if you're new here my name is Chris and I build productivity apps the two productivity apps I've been focusing on on this channel are Ellie which is a daily planning app it's an app that lets you plan out your day and visualize your week the second app I used should talk about is Luna which is a budgeting app that I recently launched it's available on iOS so that one's pretty new but it does actually have a handful of users using it so as I've been posting these videos on YouTube one of the common questions I've been getting is how did I get started with product analytics how do I think about product analytics so this is the video about product analytics that I wish existed when I started my building Journey this video is going to be super actionable and very applicable to early stage Builders so if you've never implemented analytics or you have but you're really not sure where to take it this video is going to be tailored to you you guys are going to see real data for my productivity app Elite the numbers that I look at the questions that I ask myself so you guys can actually see how I think about product analytics as an early stage app builder so that's what we're going to be covering today and my hope is that by the end of the video you are way more comfortable with analytics and if you're not a product Builder and you're watching this hopefully this is just a fun video for you to see behind the scenes of a productivity app okay so the first thing I want to address is how do I approach analytics what are my recommendations the first important Guideline 1: Only track what you need thing is I only track and monitor exactly what I need a big mistake that I made early on was I looked to big companies for advice on how to get started with this stuff so I was reading articles from Spotify and Airbnb on how they do their analytics and this is all really good advice but the problem is they're just at a different scale than I'm at they have hundreds of millions of users and I had like five users using my product so them tracking like the intricacies of their onboarding flow and figuring out where people drop off and AB testing all these images none of that really applied to me because my product didn't even have the basics down I ended up copying a lot of their strategies tracking onboarding tracking retention for specific features I ended up with a lot of useless data points I wasn't even making product decisions because I had this information paralysis just staring at a dashboard with a 100 different charts when I realized that this was a problem I change my philosophy I try to keep it simple and track as little as possible so then the next question is What you should track at the beginning (week 1 retention) okay if I'm not supposed to track everything what should I be tracking then so here's my specific actionable advice for early stage Builders if your product is very early like my budgeting app Luna or the way Ellie was a couple months ago the one thing I would look at is week one retention and basically what this means is how many people after sign up are still using your app one week later so the reason this is important is it tells you are people actually using your app so let's take Ellie for example a couple months ago when I first started looking at analytics and I was tracking this number Week 1 retention was less than 1% that means for every 100 users that signed up for Ellie maybe one user was using it a week later which is pretty bad when you see a number like Week 1 retention you see it's less than 1% basically none of other metrics matter anymore there's no point in trying to optimize and ab test everything if people sign up and no one's sticking to your app let's say you're tracking week one retention okay so what do you do now I know that it's How to improve week 1 retention less than 1% for Ellie how am I going to improve that this is an answer you probably don't want to hear but it's you got to go talk to users that could be through email that could be calling them on the phone but you need to talk to users and ask them is there something missing like what's going on the answers to that are the secret to improving that week 1 retention number when I started talking to users and asking them hey why did you drop off shockingly people actually responded to me and were pretty honest and they would tell me things like you only support Google Calendar and I use Outlook or I use Apple calendar I really need push notification support for my meetings stuff like that once I started hearing some of this stuff over and over again I realized I need to deliver these features for them to even begin to use the product what I started doing is relentlessly started building out some of these features to try to improve that week 1 retention let's take the Outlook in the Apple calendar examples once I released those Integrations the week one retention went up to like 19% so now when 100 people sign up around 19 people would be using it a week later there's still like 80 something people who dropped off but this is a huge improvement from where the app was a couple months ago before I had these Integrations and honestly no amount of product analytics would have answered that question I had to go talk to the users to figure this out so my advice to early stage Builders is religiously track week one retention the number will be depressingly low most likely but that's great cuz now you have a benchmark then you start talking to users figuring out what's missing build those things for them and then see if that week 1 retention increases over time and this is the approach that I'm taking for my app Luna the one thing I'm tracking is Week 1 retention and then I'm looking at the feedback board and talking to customers to figure out what do I build how do I get them to stick with app and not drop off immediately that's how I approach things at a very early stage okay so now let's talk about when should you start tracking more When to track more data stuff let's say you've improve week R retention let's say that week one retention is 34% right now if 100 people sign up 34 people are still using the app which is so much better than it was a couple months ago so this is the stage that I would recommend using analytics to figure out what to prioritize and at the end of the day that's what analytics really is it's supposed to be a tool to help you figure out what to work on and prioritize the road map so looking at Ellie one thing that I noticed was people keep requesting features that already exist in the app this is signaling to me that there might be a feature discoverability problem here like people aren't aware that some of these features exist so one of the things that I want to answer is if I have to tackle and try to improve feature discoverability for certain features which are the features that need the most help one of the boards and one of the things that I'm now tracking is how many people sign up and use this feature or turn this feature on at least once if the number is really low there's a high chance people don't know it exists so let me show you guys what this board looks like and this is real data this is the last 30 days this is my real thought process here when I see something like this you know I could improve basically everything here like I all these numbers can be improved but I think the two most shocking things that I see here to be honest are the fact that only 3% of people are creating lists that's extremely shocking to me lists are in my opinion such a critical feature of the app like I use it on a daily basis everyone that I know who uses Le uses lists if only 3% are using it that's a problem calendar linked so this one's pretty interesting to me 177% of people who signed up actually linked a calendar I thought the number would be closer to like 50% or something maybe my onboarding is not clear enough that they can't even link the calendar a number this low is signals to me this is definitely an area that I should also improve in this is basically my process look at these graphs Implement features see if it went up look at these graphs and just repeat the process over and over again and once these small graphs go up I know that week 1 retention will go up and then I know conversion and I know Revenue will be going up this is a very simplified version of of my actual process that I'm using when building the app but again I didn't do this until I knew that the week 1 retention was at a pretty good place I feel like if I looked at this too early all of these charts would be horrible and I would get kind of distracted and overwhelmed and it really wouldn't be helpful for me to What tool I use for analytics (Posthog) prioritize things so let's talk a little bit about what tools I use how I actually track the stuff how I implement it so the tool that I use and the tool that I recommend all my Builder friends use is post hog for Trans FY they are sponsoring the video this is a video I was planning on making before they even offered to sponsor it and I've already recommended them in my past videos without them sponsoring I promise that this has absolutely no influence on me using and recommending them I was already doing it before so if you want to try them out there's a link in the description you can actually put my name down when you sign up so that they know this is where you came from if you want to do that go ahead and if not this advice works for any Analytics tool out there but I personally use and recommend post hog they're like the most affordable one so just a little disclaimer that is a sponsored Link in the description even if you're not using post hog this is kind of the way it works for all the analytics tools so How to implement analytics and create reports there's usually some sort of package you can install on your app to make this a little easier and they'll give you a little snippet that you can use to track events as they happen in your app this is the part of my code base that fires every time my user creates a task when I insert this code here it'll actually go send this off to post hog and this is what it looks like when it's fired so as you see I created the task it now appears in post hog and it's tracked on that user so once you start adding these trackers and the data starts rolling in you can then start creating dashboards inside of post hog so then you can start actually interpreting and reading the dat data let's take a look at a really simple example you want to see how many people sign up and create a task so you can click add insight and then what we're looking for is a funnel so you add Insight you go to funnel I'm also tracking when users sign up the first step I'm going to put in here is user signed up and then the second step is going to be task created I'll aggregate it by only showing me unique users and so what this is going to do is show me how many people did the first step which is they signed up and then created a task and we're going to say that they need to create that task in the first 14 days to count so once we set that and this has been collecting data for a while we can see 516 people signed up and only 347 people actually created a task which is about 67% 30% actually didn't even create the task they signed up and then just didn't do anything but this is basically how you set these things up create this tracker it's super simple the data rolls in and then you create dashboards like this and then you repeat the process over and over again for every single thing that you want to track you can use any Analytics tool for this but the one that I use and the one I recommend is post hog so sign up if you haven't they have a very generous free plan so you can just try them out and see if you like it but that's how you set all this stuff up okay so to Key takeaways wrap up the video here are my key takeaways analytics is super powerful and I really think at any stage of the product Journey they can be implemented and used even really really early on I think they can be really useful but the important thing is to only track exactly what you need so you don't get overwhelmed and if you had to pick one thing the specific thing I recommend tracking at the early stage is Week 1 retention how many people sign up and are still using your product a week later that's my specific recommendation and then once that's good then you can start tracking other stuff to help you make product decisions then the most important takeaway here is that anal Antics is a supplement but not a replacement to talking to users make sure you're still talking to users cuz that's the best way to figure out what to work on especially at the early stage hopefully this video was helpful if you have any other questions feel free to comment below if you like this kind of Thanks for following along/outro :) content definitely go check out my Tik Tok and Instagram I post almost every other day about building a productivity app and obviously if you like this kind of content don't forget to subscribe but thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you guys in the next video [Music] no