pgopalan's comments

pgopalan | 11 years ago | on: Uber vs. Lyft: From The Driver’s Seat

This post references its original parent in Pando Daily. I'm surprised there is no disclosure in Pando Daily that investors in Pando Daily such as A16Z, Founder's Fund, Peter Thiel are also investors in Lyft. I think it is only fair that every post in Pando Daily should carry that disclosure so that readers are fully aware of the connection. Why isn't this not called out? I just read a post in Medium which is rightfully questioning the motivation of these media posts absent the disclosure. https://medium.com/@PersonofAwesome/buying-news-coverage-and... We need more transparency from the media outlets.

pgopalan | 12 years ago | on: Bill Gates loses to Magnus Carlsen in 9 moves

This works only if the colors are reversed in subsequent boards. To avoid this trick, all traditional simuls (short for simultaneous play - where one chess master plays many people) have two simple rules: 1)The chess master has the same color in all the boards 2) The color of the chess master's pieces are usually white

Since white always makes the first move in a chess game, it is not possible to copy the game from board A and play it in board B with reverse colors.

pgopalan | 12 years ago | on: Mixpanel Lets Devs Deliver Targeted Messages Through New In-App Notifications

I use both Mixpanel and Intercom.

Mixpanel has been excellent at showing marketing metrics in a typical SaaS funnel (Attention - e.g. visitors/locn./browser a consumable Google Analytics, Acquisition - e.g. did the visitor click the sign up button and become a new user, Retention - how often did the user come back). Mixpanel also has cohort analysis - users that signed up on a certain day, how long have they have been active/inactive and by extension you can calculate the churn. Depending on how you instrument your Mixpanel you can track user activity and understand product engagement. So if you release a new feature and there is no clicks on it, Mixpanel will show you that and you can remove it.

Intercom overlaps with Mixpanel in providing Acquisition information and Activity information (number of sign ins, last sign in etc). What is awesome about Intercom is the messaging feature. You can simply select one or more users and compose your responsive email (and you'll be shown a window on how the email looks in a mobile device) and send the email and track email metrics. To a product manager or customer success person at a SaaS business this is a great way to communicate with users. Intercom also has auto responders. So you can send welcome emails after a sign up (Mailchimp!).

In my opinion, Intercom is heading towards combining Mixpanel, Zendesk and Mailchimp all in one in the most elegant and practical way I can think of. Mixpanel and Kissmetrics are very similar.

(a self-plug: at kanban2go, we open sourced our mixpanel rails engine here: https://github.com/kanban2go/mixpanel-rails)

page 1