Comments on: How Many Software Companies Monitor Their Software as Well as Tesla Monitors its Cars? http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/how-many-software-companies-monitor-their-software-as-well-as-tesla-monitors-its-cars/ For Executives, Entrepreneurs, and other Digerati who need to know about SaaS and Web 2.0. Wed, 19 Jun 2013 23:40:20 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.com/ By: Jay Nathan http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/how-many-software-companies-monitor-their-software-as-well-as-tesla-monitors-its-cars/#comment-11607 Tue, 19 Feb 2013 18:17:48 +0000 http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/?p=2582#comment-11607 We are starting to and I do in most of my side projects. There are a number of great tools that are springing up such as MixPanel (http://www.mixpanel.com) which are fit and finished for this purpose. It can be somewhat painful to retrofit instrumentation, but it’s usually worth every hour spent, even for established products. Musk and his team appropriately started from the ground-up with proper instrumentation.

One of my favorite blog posts on the subject is on the Code as Craft blog (etsy engineering team): http://codeascraft.etsy.com/2011/02/15/measure-anything-measure-everything/

Thanks for the great blog, Bob. I’ve enjoyed reading for a couple of years now!

]]> By: Esteban Kolsky (@ekolsky) http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/how-many-software-companies-monitor-their-software-as-well-as-tesla-monitors-its-cars/#comment-11552 Sat, 16 Feb 2013 04:25:27 +0000 http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/?p=2582#comment-11552 good points, well explained — but how do you combat the mentality? cloud vendors and new startups, no problem – they do this as part of who they are and can easily adapt…old established? that is the bigger problem IMO.

]]> By: songzunhuang http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/2013/02/14/how-many-software-companies-monitor-their-software-as-well-as-tesla-monitors-its-cars/#comment-11542 Thu, 14 Feb 2013 19:25:09 +0000 http://smoothspan.wordpress.com/?p=2582#comment-11542 As you know, I’ve been doing a few mobile startups lately. We discovered that if you didn’t somehow engage the user within the first few hours of their download to the mobile phone, you see an immediate drop in usage. People actually download stuff and forget to even launch it! Now for mobile software, it is somewhat trickier because the download usually comes from an appstore which you do not control. However, if they have launched your software even once, then you have a change to start helping them. Did you know that about 20% of mobile logins fail due to the fact that people can’t type well on mobile/virtual keyboards? This is why stuff like PIN based authentication is becoming so popular. Anyway, I totally agree with your assessment of helping users along. At my past startup, users would get a series of tutorial emails after signup. Each one would walk them through one feature. At the end of the series, they would have a good idea of the capabilities. There’s a trick to increase engagement with these “emails”, but that’s another story. ;)

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