It’s Good to Look up Once in Awhile

Photo by Greg Rakozy

Whew! 2015 is nearly over and it was a blur. We’ve been very heads-down and focused on building product and serving customers. Sometimes it’s nice to pull your head up and see what’s happened to reflect on the changes. I hope to do a little bit of that here before the end of 2015.

First, I’d like to thank all of our customers and users for their feedback and support this year. Honestly, without you, our job would be far less fulfilling. I appreciate the patience you’ve had while we fill out part of our solution, and with our penchant for experimentation. We know that we have a proclivity for shipping early and often, and your understanding helps us be more effective.

We’ve done a lot on the product side this year, and we candidly have high standards here. We’re all product people –and our customers are mostly product people. We hope that we don’t suck here, but we work hard to uphold high standards. We ship new software generally every week, so I’ll try to simply capture the highlights.

We began the year by adding Paths and Funnels. Funnels are a table stakes feature for any web analytics company. We felt we needed it simply to be competitive. However, we tried to add some “twists” that made it special. (Btw, I hope you see that we’re generally always trying to find a few “twists” that make our implementation just a tad unique.) Our Funnels have no set session length –it’s completely arbitrary. And, our Funnels allow folks to measure drop-off between pages and/or features, which is completely novel.

Now, the second we implemented Funnels, we got lots of feedback like, “can you just show us how people are flowing through our product.” So we built Paths. Paths are super neat. Honestly, most of our customers are just starting to scratch the surface with this feature. Interestingly, more subscriptions overall have used Funnels since their inception than Paths (by about 10%). However, more subscriptions now use Paths more than Funnels on a monthly basis by over 20%.

Next, we worked on Segments. This was a huge release. People, who know me well, know that I hate big batches of work. Segments was a big batch. It affected every page and every chart in our product. However, once we launched it, it’s been huge. Our Segments allow you to slice and dice usage data in very unique ways, and it creates new use cases that were previously impossible with our product. We added a Salesforce integration before this, and enabled you to create Segments based on CRM data. If you don’t know about this, please read this post and this case study as I cannot do this justice. I can only say that almost 100% of our customers use this feature. It is game-changing, and while I’m not a fan of big batches –this was a good use of our time.

Lastly, we finished out the year with two significant additions to our guides: Polls and Templates. We’ve already written a bunch about this, but they are a significant addition. Every company needs to solicit qualitative feedback, but it’s largely a manual process. Plus, organizations are finding that it’s getting progressively harder to rely on email alone to communicate with customers. Soliciting feedback in-application, using Polls, is a creative way to increase response rates.

Templates were created in response to customers building processes around scalably adding Guides to their product. Now, customers can create and style a Template, and then have less technical users (marketing, tech writing, etc) simply fill-out and place them in the product. This significantly reduces the effort to add Guides while maintaining high quality.
2015 was a great year for Pendo. Since completing our financing we’ve more than doubled the size of our team, signed a new lease, and are preparing to continue helping our customers create successful software. See you in 2016!!