Startup Retro, 12/4–12/11
The last week just flew by! We were heads down on improving the onboarding process for developers, as we aim to shorten the usage-feedback-iteration flywheel.
Read on to get a quick summary on our highlights, challenges, and asks. In particular, if you know anyone at ETHDenver, I’d love an assist on getting our speaker applications due consideration 😅
Highlights
- Getting Noticed. We began BD outreach to a dev tool influencers and authors who compile “dev tool lists.” This week, Sidekik was listed on the ConsenSys Dev Tool and the Ethereum Classic Dev Tool lists.
- Engaged User Sessions. User analytics show that some users spend 60+ minutes per session, while the average session is closer to 13 minutes. We’re pondering, “how do we turn those users into advocates?” Your ideas are welcome.
- Feedback & Support. We added Intercom to capture feedback and offer support. One user already suggested a useful feature: saving contracts that they interact with frequently, because contracts currently disappear upon refreshing the page.
Challenges
- Sync Directory Feature. It seems most users do not save their contract address and ABIs to a local file, preferring to onboard via our ‘sync directory’ feature. Reading every file in the browser’s main thread, however, was a painfully slow user experience. We updated our code this week, and we’re now delivering a much faster experience.
- Onboarding. Some devs did not successfully onboard last week. Sidekik was built as an internal tool for users who had prior knowledge of how to setup and get value. Obviously, that’s not the case for a random developer coming to the web app for the first time. We see that stuck users read the browser’s console logs, and so we updated the error messages there to provide more onboarding guidance. Second, we fixed a bug where people uploaded ABI files first and then connected a chain, which caused the UI to enter a glitchy loop:
Asks
- ETHDenver. We submitted applications to speak at ETHDenver. If you have any connections to that speaker selection committee, I’d love an assist there.
Thank you for reading and following our journey 🙏