How is your Product used?

Every successful startup knows the “ins and outs” of how their users are extracting value out of the product. This involves everything that happens since your user lands on your website or app and until they perform several events with your product like registration, creating a new project or completing payment info.

This is the reason that got you here: solve a problem for people who eventually will end up turning into paying customers. And how do you know if you’re solving this problem for them? By understanding really well how they are behaving when they are using your product. Today. Not next quarter.

If you release a feature or make a major change in your product today, you can’t wait 4 months to understand how users are reacting to that. You need to go fast. And sometimes, if you depend on other teams to get to this data, you’re always late. Making it even more difficult to prioritize your roadmap and drive impact at your organization. You need to understand the value you’re creating today.

From SaaS to E-commerce to Consumer Apps, it’s all about the value generated by the product. Also, finding ways to capture that value and translate it into revenue, but that’s for another blog post. In any case, (most of the time) value comes before money. Your product changes someone’s life in such a positive way that they are willing to pay you for this.  

In this blog post, we’ll focus on building a product dashboard with the essential metrics that you should be checking. It’s really fast with Latitude, check this out!  

Zoom in on the Product dashboard

We know, every product is unique and yours is no different. But something that all products need to answer is if a user is active or not. The definition of an active user will be different depending on your product. We encourage you to read this blog post from Reforge on how to understand better your most-engaged users.

From here, you can figure out your own definition of what is an active user and which is the right usage frequency for these users. Depending on the case, your product will be used daily, weekly or monthly. Let’s focus on this last one.

We’ll build a Monthly Active Users (MAU) chart showing its evolution through different months. This is one of the most crucial product metrics as it shows how users are recurringly coming back and using your product. If you can show a positive trend in this chart, it’s a sign that you’re doing something good.

Okay cool, once you have a clear understanding of how many active users you have each month, it’d be great if you can find the percentage of users that become paying customers. At the end of the day, it’s what truly matters, right? So we’ll create a Monthly Conversion Rate chart so you can see if there’s any fluctuation between months.

And last but not least, are your paying customers staying with your product? Maybe you have a killer sales team turning active users into customers, but then they are not getting enough value on a consistent basis and they decide to cancel their subscriptions or contract. This creates a leak in your funnel and makes it even harder to grow at a healthy rate.

For this reason, we need to have a Monthly Churn Rate chart to keep an eye on top of this. Not sure what churn is? No worries at all, our friends at Reforge got you covered here too. It’s important that before building a data app with Latitude, you ask yourself why you want to build it in the first place. Understanding very well the questions you want to answer is key to being successful when you leverage your data.

Everything is clear now, so let’s get to building with Latitude!

Building your own Product dashboard

In order to build this data app, we have our data stored in a table inside our MySQL database. We can set up our MySQL connector blazingly fast and without any extra dev time. Just follow the steps in the documentation and you’ll be ready. It seems too easy to be true, but it actually is! Give it a try and let us know.

You have everything you need to start building. Let’s go after our first chart: Monthly Active Users (MAU). We just need to connect a new code block to our MySQL source and make the following query:

SELECT
	month,
	COUNT(active_user)
FROM {{$1}}
WHERE active_user = 'TRUE'
GROUP BY month
ORDER BY month ASC

After you have written the query, make sure to run the block by clicking on the play icon on the top left and from here, add an area chart, set the X axis, the Y axis and you got it:

MAU Chart:

Cool. For the next chart, we want to calculate the Monthly Conversion Rate of our product. In this case, we’ll segment our users between “paying_users” and “non_paying_users”. We can do it by running these couple of queries:

“paying_users”:

SELECT
	month,
	COUNT(type) AS paying_users
FROM {{$1}}
WHERE type = 'paying'
GROUP BY month
ORDER BY month ASC

“non_paying_users”:

SELECT
	month,
	COUNT(type) AS non_paying_users
FROM {{$1}}
WHERE type <> 'paying'
GROUP BY month
ORDER BY month ASC

Do you know that performing a JOIN is super easy in Latitude? Just grab our JOIN transformation block and join both queries on “month”:

Now it’s as simple as dividing “paying_users” by “non_paying_users” with this query:

SELECT
	month,
	(paying_users / non_paying_users) AS conversion_rate
FROM {{$1}}

And add a line chart:

Conversion Rate Chart:

We’re almost there. In order to become with the Churn Rate chart we can follow the same process with the queries and the JOIN, but diving “churned_users by “non_churned_users”:

Churn Rate Chart:

Wrapping up

You’ve just created a data app for your Product metrics with Latitude! That’s no small feature. Let’s ice the cake creating a beautiful view of your Product dashboard:

It’s probable that you have your roadmap on Notion, don’t you? We think it’s a good idea that the metrics of your Product dashboard live close to it. It’s astonishingly simple to embed your charts on Notion, just select the block, copy the iframe and paste it. That’s it.

If you want to go fast with your Product dashboard so you know what happens every day, not every other month, we can help! We’ll be more than happy to assist you in creating your first data app in Latitude for free. No strings attached. Just reach out to us here and we’ll take care of it.

Or if you want to check things on your own, go ahead and sign up for free at latitude.so!

We’d love to hear your feedback and understand how we can deliver more value to you.