Ask HN: New Product Rollout Advice and Strategies
Phase 1 - Rollout and Launch: During this initial growth phase, I know I need to continually improve how each customer type finds my product, and I need to make sure that my product is tracking "enough data" for generating some reports that I can understand how to pivot + enhance + prioritize based off how each customer type uses my product. Right now, I am tracking customer free trial signups and customer conversions to a paid plan. Am I missing anything obvious as I look to roll this out?
Phase 2 - Growth: What tools and or products will help route customers to my website? I used Google Analytics before with some success for searching, conversion tracking, and adwords. I am sure there are more so what others am I missing and what tools did you find effective for helping draw customers to your new product? I have heard about https://kissmetrics.com/ through another startup, but it is pricey without knowing more about it ($200/month for the basic "starter" plan and a 14-day trial is not long enough to realistically figure this all out).
Phase 3 - Growth + Engagement: After I have enough customers (~500), I want to start engaging them and transition from purely growth-focused to growth + engagement to increase my revenue per customer and customer retention time. Are there any approaches, best practices, tools or products that will help during this growth + engagement phase? I have heard that converting all my simple html links to "deep links" with something like https://bitly.com/ will help me analyze how each customer type uses or finds value with my product. What other tools and or practices would you recommend for product refinement? I was looking into https://mixpanel.com/pricing/ which sounds like a potential solution.
I added some more details + questions about the product to my profile.
Thanks in advance!