Andrew Machado's Blog

Facebook Gifts getting smarter

Andrew Machado — Tue, 02 Apr 2013 17:54:03 +0000

Mark Samuels recently posted he closed a purchase order with Bed, Bath & Beyond. A lot of the comments said congrats or congratulations. Facebook must analyze the words used in comments and the amount of times people are writing congrats and inserts the gift button. Really smart.

Using Google Analytics to track down bugs

Andrew Machado — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 04:51:04 +0000

Since I’m the primary QA team for Open Home Pro I need all the help I can get when it comes to testing. Besides enrolling a portion of users into a beta test I look for clues about where users are having trouble to detect bugs.

One of my favorite places to look is Google Analytics. I look for rare spikes on certain pages that may give me a clue as to what is going wrong. For example check out the image below

In early February all of the sudden there was a huge spike in impressions of our forgot password page. How in the heck can twice as many people be requesting a password reset. Could our login system be broken? Nope. I started getting a lot of emails about how the app wouldn’t let people login even after they reset their password.

It turns out we had an edge case where if the user logged out of the app without Wi-Fi that they could never log back in even if they reset their password. I never would’ve figured this out had it not been for Google Analytics. Within 7 days we had the bug fixed and deployed to Apple and the metrics returned to normal.

Never be afraid to let the data guide you.

Real Estate is seasonal so strap on your seat belt

Andrew Machado — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 19:18:58 +0000

The holiday’s are a time when mobile developers push their best version of apps into the apps store hoping for millions of downloads from newly activated devices. Sadly in real estate the holidays aren’t too fun.

Trulia’s earnings showed mobile traffic was flat in Q4 and traffic to their site grew by just a few percentage points from desktop browsers.

Just look at traffic to Open Home Pro from November-December vs. January-February.

Understanding your customer down to the seasons of highest activity are crucial.

Test new features without building them

Andrew Machado — Fri, 15 Feb 2013 22:42:52 +0000

I answer a lot of support emails for Open Home Pro. In fact I answer all of them, plus Olark chats and even attempt to handle all of the phone calls I receive…but I’ve fallen a bit behind.

One of the questions I get a lot is how do you know what next to build for the app and how do you decide to do it. We spend a lot of time discussing efficiency vs. forward thinking. One feature we get asked constantly is can I access my collected leads from my web browser. The issue I have with building anything web based especially lead management is there are 100s of lead managers. Top Producer. Wise Agent. They will all do a 100 times better job than we will on our best day. So instead of building the lead manager we’ve put together a great little page that details all of the ways you can get the leads out and into other product. Check it out.

What I like about this we can continue to evaluate interest in this feature by traffic and inquires and our users get a bit of education of how easy it is to get your leads out of our system and into others.

In startups I think your two most precious resources are time and money. Build things you are fundamentally certain are important to your business long term.

Traveling tip with MacBook Pro + iPhone Charging

Andrew Machado — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 06:14:29 +0000

I find myself often low on phone battery and wanting to use my laptop somewhat on a trip without a plug on an airplane. Here is a quick tip to charge your iPhone from the laptop without using much battery.

1. Open your MacBook Pro to the point it wakes from sleep.

2. Plug in your iPhone and the usb cable to start charging it.

3. Put the MacBook back to sleep.

4. You’ll notice the iPhone continues to charge off the laptop while its sleeping. Heaven.

By the time you land your iPhone is back to 100% charge and you sipped just a bit off your MacBook Pro.