How Pry improved registrations by 20-30% with PostHog
Oct 18, 2021
Pry is a financial planning software for small businesses, enabling founders and finance teams to build models and forecasts without the risks that come from working in spreadsheets. Launched out of the Y Combinator startup accelerator, Pry already has over 200 customers since launching in 2021 and is growing rapidly.
Product analytics has been a key for Pry since the very beginning, according to Founder and CEO Andy Su, who introduced PostHog at launch in order to track how the app was used.
“I was obviously especially interested in the sign-up funnel,” said Andy. “What’s interesting about our product is that users need to connect financial data after they sign up, usually through Quickbooks or Xero integrations. I really cared about the drop-off rate for that because if it’s too high then we need to do something to help users through to the finish line.”
After using PostHog to get data on how this was affecting conversion, Andy enabled users to skip this integration step and proceed with demo data instead.
“We’ve improved the number of people who get past that stage by around 20-30% as a result of that change,” said Andy. “The whole flow has improved by about 5% too, which is great.”
Automating success with PostHog’s open source integrations
With these initial improvements in place, Pry has also been using PostHog to guide and track the success of other product decisions.
“As a startup we don’t have all the resources to test everything and plan things super well,” said Andy. “However, we can use PostHog to answer questions and track results. It almost doesn’t matter what our metrics are, as long as they are improving. If we aren’t improving, we need to know so we can figure out why — and that’s where PostHog comes in.”
Pry has even automated some activities to respond to issues automatically, such as by integrating PostHog with Customer.io to send emails when drop-offs are detected in a funnel.
“Other times, PostHog helps us answer questions. We just had a meeting, for example, where we were asking: How valuable are customers who come to us via ads as opposed to those who are organic? We were able to answer that question with PostHog and use that information to make decisions about our advertising strategy, which is hugely valuable to us.”
“For us, PostHog isn’t just about making decisions. A lot of our product and marketing ideas come from looking at the analytics too. There are things you don’t even think of until you see the data.”
Improving collaboration and customer support with session replays
As a startup and a small team, Pry has recognised the importance of knowledge sharing and giving everyone access to the right tools. Unlike traditional business analytics tools which require custom SQL queries, PostHog is entirely self-serve and as a result can be used by a wide variety of teams — from designers and engineers to leadership and marketing.
Even Pry’s support team occasionally use the tool, checking session replays to understand how particular bugs may have occurred.
“We use PostHog to make updates on the website too,” said Andy. “Recently we saw that a lot of people were clicking the Docs link at the very bottom of our footer, for example. Nothing else, just that button. Spotting that with PostHog’s heatmap tool helped us know we needed to surface that link somewhere else and pushed us to put it in the main navigation.”
“Things like that? It’s why every data-driven company should be using a product like PostHog.”