I’ve written about how we use Metabase at Reforge, and how I’m a big fan. It has allowed us to make data accessible to anyone in the organization, whether it’s for a deep analysis or for a quick status update on an important initiative.
We use Segment as one of the key pieces of data our data infrastructure, and I recently turned on the Stripe integration. I was pleasantly surprised by how well it works. I authenticated into our Stripe account to configure it as a source within Segment. Segment then updates tables in our data warehouse with the latest and greatest data from Stripe. This is a screenshot of our database and the tables under the Stripe schema:
On one of our key dashboards showing our progress in generating revenue, I wanted a cumulative revenue chart. This is helpful to see how quickly we’re generating revenue, what our total revenue in a period of time is, and how our revenue growth compares to previous periods.
This is a sample chart that’s easy to setup in Metabase:
To generate it, this is the SQL I wrote to generate it:
The way it works:
The first statement generates a table (that’s the generate_series function) that has a start date and end date
I join from that table with a left join to the stripe payments table. This ensures that if we don’t have a day of revenue, the day still shows up in our table. This table gives me a total amount of revenue per day.
In the final part of the statement, I use a window function to do a cumulative sum of all of the revenue per day, so that day 2 has all of day 1’s revenue along with day 2’s revenue added in.
I hope this helps you create similar charts of revenue per day or cumulative revenue reports. I’ve worked with teams where we’ve manually hit the Stripe API to pull all of this information, which is always a pain in the butt. The nice part of this solution is that Segment keeps the table up to date automatically, and then anyone can run these reports on the latest values in the data warehouse.
While we’re still an early stage company, the type of integration is super powerful. There are a lot of interesting applications of being able to access failed charges, successful charges, refunds, and the various types of paying customers when joined to other data sources.
When I joined Reforge a year ago, I found that we were querying our databases manually to do routine analysis. If we wanted to update the team on the number of people who had applied or paid for our programs, we’d run a query against the database and then put the results in a spreadsheet. If we wanted a list of users from our programs by company, we’d run a query and put it in a spreadsheet. While this answered our questions at the time, I felt like we could do a lot better. After having used Looker in my time at HubSpot, I wanted a lightweight solution to help us enable the entire company to have access to critical data about the business and make data-informed decisions. We started using metabase.
Metabase has been a huge help for me in democratizing access to our data. Metabase connects directly to any databases you want, and it allows anyone in the company (I have chosen not to set up advanced permissions yet) to manually inspect data, do advanced reporting, or view dashboards.
This is an example of what it looks like when someone looks at our program applications table (simple database table that keeps track of applications to our growth programs):
Benefits:
Team members can look at the table as if it were a spreadsheet
They can apply filters as if it was a spreadsheet
They can visualize the results more easily than in a spreadsheet
I routinely build reports in metabase that filter to people with a certain condition and send it to teammates. It’s so easy to report on people who work at company X that are in participating in one of our programs. Much better to generate a simple report and then share it with a colleague knowing that it should always be up to date, even if our underlying data is updated.
You can also easily switch between a table view, and many other ways to visualize the data (table, line chart, area chart, bar chart, row chart, scatter chart, pie chart, and a map):
Once you’ve filtered your data set and chosen how to visualize it, it’s easy to then add it to a dashboard of other reports. It’s really nice that you can combine data from multiple databases into the same dashboard, and drag and drop the charts in any configuration you want. This is a dashboard that I setup to monitor the performance of applications submitted to our recent cohort of programs, as well as how people were paying for their spot. It has a segmentation of which programs they’re applying to, how much revenue we’re generated, how we’re comparing to previous periods, and where people are submitting applications from:
There are a ton of other features that I am a huge fan of. Some of them:
Posting questions to slack at a regular interval:
Or via email:
It has been a huge help for me personally, and this doesn’t even cover all of the ways in which we use it. Best of all, it’s free and open source. We pay to host it ourselves via Amazon Elastic Beanstalk.
This kind of solution comes in incredibly handy in our overall data pipeline, especially when we can point it to a copy of our production database and our analytics data warehouse that is populated by Segment.
If you read about the strategy of successful tech companies today, it’s all about having “obsessive customer focus” (Jeff Bezos’ 2016 Amazon annual shareholder letter). You’ll hear that “whoever gets closest to the customer wins” (Drift), and that companies want to “solve for the customer” (HubSpot culture code). Ultimately, the question isn’t about whether you’re focused on your customers, but how you go about evaluating who they are, what they’re trying to accomplish, and how they’re interacting with your product. I recently started using a workflow that gives me a continual stream of feedback, allows me to go back and forth to dig deeper and clarify important questions, and then also easily share the results with my team. It also required no effort from our engineering team to setup and didn’t require additional budget.
I work at Reforge, and we’re an education company. We offer programs for those located in SF, but we also have an equivalent online-only experience. For a bunch of our key initiatives this year, I felt that I didn’t fully understand what brought people back to our web app after some time away, and I wanted to dive deeper to improve it. Rather than do a one offsurvey, I setup a campaign that runs continuously to deliver this feedback on a daily basis.
Using Segment to create our list of “alumni” to survey
When I arrived at Reforge we were already using Segment, and we ended up buying their personas add-on. I’m a relatively happy customer (and happy they just raised $175 million), but used it because we were already paying for it. I’m a big fan of using the tools available to you.
Segment has a feature called Audiences that lets you create lists of people. Since most of our important data attributes and events were already flowing through Segment, it was very easy to define small segments or large swathes of our user base through a simple editor. While I live and breathe SQL, sometimes it’s really nice to build it out in a GUI. Here’s what I built:
The nice thing about this is that when someone enters this audience, it means that they’re an alum, they’re not in our most recent cohort, and they have viewed our online material. The cool thing is that you could specify anything about the users that you have available (role, country, seniority, depth of engagement, type of user, organization, etc).
A feature of Audiences is that you know when someone enters the audience. The way I’ve structured the audience, this will mean that they came back to our site and it has been more than 90 days since their last visit – otherwise they’d already been a member. So it’s a cool way to know when someone has come back.
Send the list of people to Zapier
Segment then allows you to send this information to any of their supported destinations. I sent this information to Zapier:
Segment tells Zapier that the user has come back to our site, and Zapier then writes it to a google spreadsheet. This is what our looks like:
What you can see here is that a user from HubSpot named Kieran has revisited how to build a qualitative growth model. I am also using a Segment API to pull in their first name and the title of the last page they visited, in case I want to include that in my outreach asking for feedback. Segment is continuously sending data about people coming back to Reforge, and each time it happens Zapier is writing it to a Google Spreadsheet for me.
Email the people revisiting the material
I then have another Zap that takes the rows from this spreadsheet and emails the person from my personal G-suite account.
You can see what it looks like if I look in my sent folder within gmail (and you can see that people have replied to the email from Gmail’s threads):
Via this workflow, I’m automatically emailing people that are coming back to our site asking them what brought them back. I love getting a continual stream of this feedback. Because it’s in Gmail, I can go back and forth with them to clarify what they mean and to dive deeper to understand. If you have a huge user base, you can easily filter down the number of people you email with another step in Zapier (mod their user id by a number to make sure you don’t email too many people at once).
Collect all of the feedback in a Google Doc
At this point I’m automatically emailing everyone from the segment I care about, and I’m able to go back and forth to clarify any questions that I have or dig deeper. Rather than copy and paste their responses into a google doc to share snippets of feedback / soundbites, I hooked up another Zap to automatically pull in their feedback and put it in a google doc.
When the feedback emails come in, I setup a gmail filter to automatically apply a label to the email. I use Zapier to look for new emails under that label, and I exclude any emails from me (my replies to them). Zapier then puts the emails as a spreadsheet row in a google sheet:
Then I used a couple of simple formulas to combine all of the emails from a single user into a single row in another spreadsheet:
I separate the replies with a ———, so the above row represents multiple emails back and forth with this person. You can see that my first question was about uses cases, and then the third one was about the ones that come up frequently.
Column A is set to be “=UNIQUE(Emails)”. That means that there will only be one row for each email address I have feedback from. The formula for column B is “=ARRAYFORMULA(TEXTJOIN(CHAR(10) & “——–” & CHAR(10), TRUE, IF(Emails=A2,Response,””)))”
Array formulas are really cool, I’ve only had the need to use them a couple of times but I am always so impressed with their functionality. Basically this formula tells Google Sheets to combine all of the emails from users (remember, each row is a single user) together with the “——–” separator.
This is pretty powerful. Now I have a spreadsheet that has the entire conversation with someone in a single spreadsheet row, and I can share that spreadsheet with my entire team. We can then add columns to categorize feedback into buckets for easy filtering / reading.
Why I love this approach:
I get to read feedback from a critically important segment of users every day. I can define multiple segments to run simultaneously. The only limit is the limit on emails I can send from my Google account (2,000 messages), and the number of emails I have time to respond to.
I get to follow up with them in my main email tool
Their feedback then gets pulled into a spreadsheet automatically that I can share with my team members, categorized, and filtered.
While this isn’t the easiest thing to put together, this is so much easier than it used to be: writing complex SQL by hand, setting up a cron job to run this, writing a custom Gmail script, and then store this information in some database / google sheet). This is so much easier. If you have read this far and are thinking about building this – let me know I’d love to try it out first.
Is there an easier way to accomplish this? Let me know, I’d love to switch to it.
I was very lucky to have worked at HubSpot during a pivotal transition in its evolution. I managed a team of Product Analysts and data scientists, and we were charged with improving our product and the overall customer experience. We did this by analyzing what our customers did in our product.
This isn’t helpful when you are a brand new startup without a product. At that stage, you should be sitting with your customers or talking to them all the time. You should be taking advantage of your ability to do things that don’t scale.
Once you have more users than you can speak with, behavioral analytics are crucial to being successful. I often have conversations with people that aren’t sure how to apply data enhanced methodologies when launching new features. They bring up a good point:
How are you supposed to leverage behavioral analytics when the feature doesn’t exist?
It’s a good question. At this stage of your lifecycle, your most important task is to speak with customers that may be a good fit for what you want to build. While you may not have people using this new feature yet, there are usually groups of people who could use it within your existing user base. You just need to find the right people to speak with.
These are the types of questions I ask:
Which of your existing users are most likely to use the new feature?
What characteristics do those users have?
What actions are they taking?
Do you know why they’re taking the actions they are and whether this new feature would be useful to them?
Take advantage of the existing users you have and their patterns of usage. If you’re building a new feature or iterating on an existing one, it’s helpful to understand the high-intensity users or the infrequent users. They are a goldmine of information and you’d be crazy if you didn’t ask them for feedback.
Talk to your existing high intensity users and your infrequent users, they are a goldmine of information. You’d be crazy to ignore their feedback when building something new.
I typically push PMs / researchers / marketers to spend 30 minutes looking at their analytics system to pick out a group of people they want to speak with. I think that anyone involved in building new products is already overloaded with too many tasks, and this can easily feel like unnecessary work or an endless process that will take too much time. I think the key is to timebox this type of analysis and have it point you in the right direction.
I agree with this Intercom post that more than half of a PM’s time should be spent understanding customers’ problems, doing research, and thinking about how design can be applied to those problems. In order to spend that time most effectively, I think behavioral analytics systems are crucial to making sure you maximize that time and understand what your existing users are doing.
I was pretty interested to read about Snapchat’s DAU numbers and their culture of secrecy. At first, I was pretty shocked to read about the stories employees told about the lengths the company goes to in order to keep its information private.
It’s consistent with anecdotal stories I’ve heard about Snap (they’re serious about privacy and keeping their own information a secret), but I always try to take these stories with a grain of salt.
I immediately thought about how we try to do things differently at HubSpot. Two elements in the HubSpot culture code are using metrics and transparency in the organization. I thought “we’re totally different than that here at HubSpot”, and I bet many of you thought the same thing when reading the Snapchat article. While I think we strive to be different, we’re far from perfect and are constantly trying to improve. Some of the questions I asked myself (and ways I want to hold myself and our teams accountable):
Does everyone in the organization have access to data (behavioral analytics, data warehouse) that helps them make better decisions?
For those that aren’t technical, is it accessible with non-technical tools?
Just because they have access to the data, do they leverage it in their ideas, analysis, and proposals?
Do we have sufficient documentation about how to use the data that’s available to all employees?
Do we make an effort to train people on using the data so they are as self sufficient as possible?
Do we create a culture of sharing and encouraging others to showcase their findings?
Do we enable others to reproduce analysis that has been done in the past?
While I like to think we’re better than the portrayal of Snapchat in the article, I’m not 100% satisfied with the answers to the questions above.
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