Doing things that scale

The dream when building something is to reach product-market fit. Everyone has their own description of what it means, but as a rule of thumb it's when everything is breaking.

In our case after more than 2 years of weekly updates packed with new features, we're at the point where things need to start scaling.

As we were building our product we thought that the biggest bet we wanted to make was inventing new ways for people to understand how their product is being used.

Over time, we built a powerful product, with templates for the most important questions and insights to find outliers in your user base.

Something we did in a very unscalable way was to use our Intercom chat to talk with many of you. Both to get feedback, fix bugs and fix the gaps in the product that we haven't built yet.

Over time one-off tasks that we needed to do once a month, started happening once a week, and now are starting to happen every day.

Here's a chart of our daily conversations in Intercom:

As you can see the numbers have been ramping up steadily - but our team size hasn't grown. This means that we're packed with requests and work to do, and are having a hard time with keeping up with the demand.

To solve this problem what we want to do is:

Automate the most time consuming tasks - everything related to data management and deletion
Grow our team - to have more people to help us automate things and build new features

This week we made progress on both ends. We started scouting and meeting senior engineers and started working on automating our most repetitive tasks.

We want to make sure that our growth leads to improvements in the quality of our service.

Automating data deletion

This week we're introducing completely self-serve workspace deletion and data deletion.

This means that if as a user you want to wipe a workspace of all of its data you can do it within the product.

The way this works is that if you head to the settings page we now have more advanced data deletion options. You can now both delete all events before or after a given date and delete all events. You can then follow the progress of every deletion from our data deletion panel.

Every week we had a lot of back and forward with customers handling their data deletions and this is a first step in automating this work.

The experience for end users will be much better now as they won't need to wait for us to get unblocked.

Aside from this we've been writing more and more help articles to make sure people can find an answer to their questions without talking to us.

What we're thinking of doing next is building a user facing bulk event, user and company deletion.

Other improvements