Task.fm was bootstrapped. This meant I didn’t have a huge amount of money to spend on expensive tools, software and infrastructure.  But that didn’t mean we had to skimp or go without. This is a series of posts on the tools, software and tricks we used to save money but still maintain the same functionality of the big guys. Check out the previous post on Customer Support tools
Website Statistics – Clicky
Nope we don’t use Google Analytics. And its for one very good reason – realtime. Clicky is a realtime stats package which also keeps track of our Twitter followers and RSS subscribers. But most importantly, if someone blogs about Task.fm I can see in realtime this happening and go out, visit the post and respond.
Clicky also has great goal and campaign tracking – which will come into play and be invaluable for us when we start doing more A/B testing.
Total Cost – $9.99 p/m (funnily enough, paid for enitrely by referring others to the service. So really $0 per month)
User Experience – CrazyEgg
You might think that small companies like us wouldn’t be able to measure how good the user experience is. CrazyEgg does it for us.
It tracks where people click on a site – instantly telling us what people are seeing, but more importantly, how people use our app. CrazyEgg isn’t turned on all the time, its only used to test new design iterations for the first few days.
Total Cost – $0 p/m
Other Stats
We also grab stats from mailchimp, our email newsletter tool. We run spilt tests on 20% of the emails we send out, testing to see which subject lines achieve the best open rate. Mailchimp also tells us how many people read our emails and what they click on.
Total Cost :
$9.99 p/m. Pretty good. The most important thing here is although these tools provide some pretty good hard data, actually listeing to the users and tracking their responses to new features is the most important thing for us.
