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Cohort analysis - User retention in a Rails application

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Re: Cohort analysis - User retention in a Rails application

#21
post #20

This looks cool and I'm excited to try it in a Rails project. But, mainly, this post highlights my frustration with most analytics tools. I have tried MixPanel and I'm currently paying $99/mo for Kiss Metrics (about to cancel). Frankly, I don't have the time to get neck-deep into one of these services, integrate it, and figure out how to turn the data into revenue-generating actions. And that's setting aside the risk…

Yeah, me too man. There's also some frustration over here about what do these analytics actually mean. Like I have so much data coming at me from everywhere now, what exactly is it telling me. One neat presentation that helps provide some focus is Dave McClure's metrics 4 pirates. http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-4-pirat... I've seen this a bunch of times, but I like that focus on Activation and R…

I agree with both of you. I've been working for an incubator for the past 2 years building more than 6 startups and tried KISSmetrics on all them. In the end we would code our own analytics into the app or keep a text file of SQL queries we'd run once a week to get some real insights/learnings.

That's what led me to create [redacted]. I don't want this to be a plug, but one idea we're playing with is Release Cohorts. Instead of just looking at new users in cohorts, I believe we should also look at existing active users and existing inactive users, and group them based on your release cycle (given the users are experiencing a common feature set).

This comes from the idea that features are released for one of three reasons: 1) Improve new user activation, 2) Continue to engage existing users and 3) Reactive existing inactive users.

Re: Cohort analysis - User retention in a Rails application

#22

This looks cool and I'm excited to try it in a Rails project. But, mainly, this post highlights my frustration with most analytics tools. I have tried MixPanel and I'm currently paying $99/mo for Kiss Metrics (about to cancel). Frankly, I don't have the time to get neck-deep into one of these services, integrate it, and figure out how to turn the data into revenue-generating actions. And that's setting aside the risk…

Ya I was in the same position. I was going to give mixpanel and try. They are doing a presentation in the area in a week or two if anyone is interested. http://www.meetup.com/SF-Growth-Hackers/events/106188332/
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