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Apply HN: Growth Report – Monitor Your Startup’s Growth in Slack

4 points by aacook 11y ago

Hey HN, I'm applying with Growth Report, a tool that helps your startup rally around growth with simple charts in Slack each morning. I went through the standard application process on 3/24 and I'm applying again here to hopefully get some feedback from the community. The first version of Growth Report super simple: Connect your existing analytics tool and Slack, then get simple growth charts everyone can understand in Slack each morning. Some of the charts include WAU, activation, retention, and acquisition. All of the charts are based off two user events: Signed Up and Authentic Usage, which is a single metric that tells you if people are using your product as expected. I’ve been in a closed beta since the end of last summer (treating this as a side project until recently). I’m working with 12 teams of various stages now, most of them < 5 person startups. A couple weeks ago I applied to be listed on Slack’s app directory and hope to go live there soon. The early feedback is enthusiastic but it’s still early and I’m unsure if this is something people really want. So I’m itching for more feedback. Would love your thoughts, whether it be here on HN or directly. (I'm on live chat as often as I can be and at alex@growthreport.co) Feedback on the tool itself is the most valuable. Onboarding takes about 3 minutes and requires Mixpanel or Amplitude. (Also, if anyone is willing to go through the onboarding on a screen share with me for 20 min, I'll gladly send you an Amazon gift card.) https://growthreport.co/?slack=y&hn Some other things I'm thinking about: A lighter-weight version using GA, an annotation feature to track what happened when (in product/marketing/sales), and channel segmentation (e.g. see activation rate for Twitter users vs those from your blog). All of that is on hold for right until I talk to more teams and make sure the foundation of the product is something people want. Some questions for you: -What metrics are you looking at every day? -Do you track weekly growth? -Is your weekly growth metric based on user action or something else (e.g. revenue)? -Do you write written updates on weekly growth? Edit: Added questions

buss 11y ago
How much are users willing to pay for this? Assume someone launched an open source tool that pulls data from segment (or maybe segment launches this themselves) -- how do you compete? What are you doing better than they can?
- aacook 11y ago
  Thanks for asking. Figuring out how much I'd charge is a weak area of the project right now. I don't think I'll charge for the tool as you currently see it, but instead for a future version that includes more (maybe things like investor updates, referral/k-factor tracking, channel segmentation, etc). A proxy for demand is startups who've paid me to implement their metrics and dashboards. That's not necessarily proof that other startups will pay for a tool on a monthly basis, but was enough to motivate me to release a free tool to the world. I love the consulting but found myself asking the same questions over and over. So I created this product to solve a big problem for myself, too. I am not totally sure how to respond about competitors. There are many more possible competitors besides Segment, too. The biggest competitor right now is spreadsheets, though. So many teams look at metrics on a daily/weekly basis and hand enter things like WAU, acquisition cost, retention into a Google spreadsheet.

4 points by aacook 11y ago

buss 11y ago

How much are users willing to pay for this? Assume someone launched an open source tool that pulls data from segment (or maybe segment launches this themselves) -- how do you compete? What are you doing better than they can?

aacook 11y ago
Thanks for asking. Figuring out how much I'd charge is a weak area of the project right now. I don't think I'll charge for the tool as you currently see it, but instead for a future version that includes more (maybe things like investor updates, referral/k-factor tracking, channel segmentation, etc). A proxy for demand is startups who've paid me to implement their metrics and dashboards. That's not necessarily proof that other startups will pay for a tool on a monthly basis, but was enough to motivate me to release a free tool to the world. I love the consulting but found myself asking the same questions over and over. So I created this product to solve a big problem for myself, too. I am not totally sure how to respond about competitors. There are many more possible competitors besides Segment, too. The biggest competitor right now is spreadsheets, though. So many teams look at metrics on a daily/weekly basis and hand enter things like WAU, acquisition cost, retention into a Google spreadsheet.