Inapptics helps mobile app creators visually analyze actual user behavior and improve their apps with proactive insights. It aggregates all user interaction events and turns them into simple visual flows and heat maps, where they see the actions users perform on each screen, where they tap and how they navigate within the app. As it collects all the user interaction data, Inapptics automatically detects crashes and replays the steps that led to the crash. It also provides suggestions on how to fix them.
Kevin William David interviewed Tigran Hakobyan, CMO at Inapptics to know more.
Hi Tigran, So tell us about Inapptics?
inapptics helps app makers analyze user behavior in mobile apps. This kind of analysis is quite complex and will soon be simplified with AI.
You simply add our SDK to your app and add 1 line of code. We then automatically capture all actions performed by your users, like where they tap and how they navigate. The collected data is then analyzed and visualized as a flow of screens, visual funnels and touch heatmaps. As a bonus, we also detect crashes and replay the exact steps that lead to the crash.
Tell me more about why you are building this?
The team behind Inapptics has been building high profile apps for some of the biggest names in the world over a period of more than 5 years. During those years we realized how much our customers hate analytics. Apart from the complicated setup, they were complaining about the lack of visibility of what users exactly do in their apps.
With current analytics solutions (e.g. Google Analytics, Mixpanel and others) app creators usually get a bunch of numbers and charts, but what app makers need is the following:
- Is their app being used as intended/designed?
- Are there any usability issues?
- What exactly was the user doing that caused the crash they cannot reproduce?
In order to start using the aforementioned tools, a developer needs to spend days and program every single event that needs to be tracked. Sometimes it can take up to two weeks until it’s fully up and running.
How is Inapptics different from what already exists in the market?
Inapptics vs Traditional analytics tools
Traditional analytics tools are pure metric based analytics, where app developer programs each individual event and then the tool tells you how many times each event was triggered.
With traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics or Mixpanel, you have to know what you need to track, which is not easy. Inapptics does not require the programming of any event, we capture all events automatically and most of the time provide insights the app owner has not even been thinking about.
Inapptics vs Session recording tools
There are also session recording tools (e.g. UXCam) that record the video of the user session in the app. But there is a big problem with those tools, as you can’t aggregate data from videos. So if you have thousands of users, most likely you are not going to watch thousands of video recordings. And there is no way to filter those videos to know which session recordings need your attention and which don’t.
We solve this issue, as we don’t do video recordings but gather data points of every user interaction in the app and then we aggregate that data. So if 100 people did the same thing in the app, we show it as one flow performed by 100 people. Of course, you can dive into individual sessions if you wish, as we provide that information too.
Who uses Inapptics? What types of roles do your customers have at their companies?
Our customers are mobile app developers, UX designers and product managers who care about user experience and want to improve their apps.
With Inapptics, developers are now able to easily reproduce any crash in their app with just one click and quickly fix it. UX designers now have the power to see how people use the app they have designed and understand if the navigation flows they envisioned are actually used as intended. Product managers and marketers can analyze user behavior in their apps and make decisions that will lead to higher engagement and revenue.
How are your customers using Inapptics? Could you share a few different use cases?
First of all, Inapptics provides the visibility that so many app makers need. When you have all your app’s user actions visually displayed in front of you, it’s fairly obvious what are the issues in the app and what you need to fix to have higher user engagement, retention and eventually revenue.
For example, one of our early customers discovered a button in their app that no one was tapping on. They moved the button to another part of the screen and started getting touches on it.
Another example is that one of our beta users had a crash happening in his app for a couple of months, but he wasn’t able to reproduce and fix it. With Inapptics it took him around 30 minutes to catch the crash and fix it.
Have there been unique use cases for Inapptics that you hadn’t thought of or expected?
One of our customers has a popular app that has no ads in it. Using inapptics they discovered that their app was hacked, injected with ads and made available on 3rd party app stores. The level of details provided by Inapptics made it possible to discover this kind of issue.
That’s awesome!
Were there any early ‘growth hacks’ or tactics that have contributed to your current success?
During the first couple of months we were offering a beta version of Inapptics and one of the ways to get new signups every day was connecting with targeted Slack communities where our potential customers (e.g. developers, UX designers) were spending their time. Also, answering industry relevant questions on Quora has helped us a lot in getting new leads.
What were some of the biggest challenges while building the product early on and how did you solve them?
One of the challenges was to keep the infrastructure stable and running when a customer adds a new app with large number of users. We solved that by switching to automatic scalable services provided by Amazon Web Services and can focus on building our product and not getting distracted by managing servers.
What have been some of the most interesting integrations you’ve added? Are there any that have been particularly impactful for you?
We have already started working on 3rd party integrations. The first one that is the integration with Slack which is already available at Slack App Directory. Inapptics users can link their account with their Slack team and get instant notifications about new crashes in their apps. More information about this integration and set up is available here.
Before we wrap up, What are the top products that you depend on to run the company & how do you use them?
AWS — we use it for our back end and we love the automatic scalability of AWS.
Slack — usually no explanation is needed for Slack.
G Suite — we use it for emails, shared files, etc.
HubSpot— we use it for our sales process. We manage our contacts, deals and overall sales pipeline in Hubspot.
MailChimp — we use it for our newsletter updates. It’s one of our favorite email marketing tools and it’s pretty simple to use it. It also offers integrations with different services, e.g. Slack.
Buffer— it’s my personal all-time favorite social media management tool. We use Buffer to schedule our social media posts and get analytics about their performance and engagement.
Drift— we use it for our website and dashboard live chat. It is a great tool that simply works.
Trello — we use it to manage our tasks. We like the visual boards in Trello and it helps us to be on top of our project tasks and deadlines.
Originally published at siftery.com.