I took part in a pre-accelerator program for local startups — yes, we're completely making up words now. Imagine having to translate pre-accelerator! Probably comes out as before the gas pedal — anyway, we had to report numbers when talking to the facilitator and mentors.
However, I had a secret. I had no clue what my conversion rate was.
I'm not computer illiterate but Google Analytics has become completely opaque to me.
I needed to track how many people were coming to my website, how many were signing up how many had no idea what my product does🤔 and just left. To solve this, I set up HotJar which allowed me to track events. It worked. Or, at the very least I told myself I have all the data!
Partially since I can't leave good enough alone and partially because HotJar was shutting down this part of their service, I started looking for another solution.
When I coded my SaaS app, I set it up to email me when a new customer signs up so I could waste no time in reaching out to them.
I then started using a customer relationship management (CRM) tool. I would copy emails of new customers into the CRM and set up follow-up reminders manually.
Of course, I wasn’t consistent and data would be out of sync in the CRM. Out of sync data is obviously the number one reason startups fail. I don’t want to fail so I had to fix it.
“Out of sync data is obviously the number one reason startups fail.”
Gezim Hoxha
The solution I had in mind was to essentially make my SaaS app the data source for customer-generated events (for example, account created, a recipe created, account deleted, a user added, etc). I thought I would hook this data into a Zapier-like thing so that I could plug in different services whenever I needed them. What’s that? It’s time to switch CRMs? No problem, just add a new hook to Zapier!
Since I didn’t want to host my own Zapier alternative, I ended up with Zapier.
Doing research, I came across PostHog which is exactly what I needed! It allows me to track arbitrary events from my app and connect Zapier to it. This way, I can do what I will with them.
Which is a round-about way of saying I can finally stop sending welcome emails manually! Now...what was I doing? Oh yeah...trying to figure out product/market fit!
In my next post, I plan to discuss a secret of a successful affiliate program from a very secretive company. Subscribe below to get notified when it drops: