June 22, 2020
Over the past month or so, I’d been working on the first version of Nocodelytics whilst also trying to build up my list of early access users.
A couple of weeks ago, I had around 10 signups (mostly from taking part in discussions on the Webflow forums) and a very basic product with just 3 screens.
As a self-taught developer, this was only the third full web app I had built from scratch and the most complicated so far. That turned out to be a good thing though as it forced me to focus on only the most essential features I needed for a prototype before getting feedback from users. Thanks to help from a senior developer friend, I managed to come up with something I could show to people.
It only had 3 screens (log in/sign up, setup and live feed) and took me about 2-3 weeks but it was still something! People could sign up, get a snippet which they add to their site and then are taken to the live feed.
So I’d been doing sort of an early access beta where I sent out invites to a few users to get their feedback on the platform. There was no expectation or ask for payment. It was simply “you’re a Webflow user, I built this tool, what do you think?”.
I wasn’t expecting anyone to say “shut up and take my money!”. To be honest, I must’ve reached out to 30 or so people (not expecting much) to try to validate the idea. About half of them actually responded in some way with 5 of them agreeing to try it out to give feedback.
Normally asking something vague like “what do you think?” isn’t a good way to garner feedback but in this case the product was so basic that I got some great responses.
I learned that onboarding was simple and quick - even faster than they had expected - which made for a great first impression. But I also learned that the MVP didn’t really tell them anything. It didn’t answer the questions they had about what their users were doing. It was also buggy and lacked basic features they had expected like clicking on a table row to get more information.
This feedback was actually incredibly helpful as it forced me to figure out what the core feature of the app would need to be.
So I put together all of the feedback I had into a spreadsheet, categorised it, and then came up with ideas for how to make the product better in line with the feedback. Some of the ideas were already on my mind (like reporting) but I was waiting for people to actually request it.
Throughout all of this, it felt like something was still missing. I didn’t want to go ahead with just building new features on top of my existing app and hope that it was what people wanted.
I also didn’t want my app to feel disjointed. Because it was, on the face of it, an analytics tool, people already have some (negative) expectations of what those are like mainly based on their experience with Google Analytics. Even though they’re different tools (Nocodelytics is event tracking focused whereas GA is mostly for website traffic).
You know what I mean, right? You open up GA and it feels like they just kept adding new reports to the site without thinking about the UX.
A friend of mine (@nikhilpaul) suggested I come up with 3 key differentiators that would make Nocodelytics stand out.
As I thought about it, I knew my app wasn’t going to be like GA and other overwhelming tools. My goal was to make a simple tool that tells you what users are actually doing in your Webflow site. That’s it. It’s not going to give you a bunch of reports with detailed breakdowns of your audience, where they came from, what devices they used, whether they’re new or returning etc.
It simply needs to tell you what users are ACTUALLY doing on your site in as few steps as possible.
So, with that, I’ve come up with 2 key differentiators for now (still thinking about the 3rd!):
With that and the feedback I had from early testers, I came up with a few ideas for the app. Namely, I’ve added a new dashboard page which provides simple but specific reports that people mentioned they wanted to see.
The next step is to start reaching out to early access users and offer them a demo. After speaking with a few founders, I decided the best thing to do would be to have 1-on-1 onboarding sessions. I can show how the app can help them answer questions they had about what users are doing on their Webflow site whilst also getting more feedback to make it better.
If the app isn’t able to answer their questions just yet then I’ll make a note of their feedback and get in touch after a few weeks.
The goal is to reach out to 10 people from the waitlist (which has now grown to 30+) and do at least 1 onboarding call a week - but it really depends on their availability.
The next post I share will be after the first few onboarding sessions. I’ll also continue to think about the key differentiators and how I can make them more unique.
Feel free to reach out to me by email or DM me on Twitter to chat!