Gaining deep insights on its users to drive scalable growth across all stages of the customer lifecycle

Khatabook is India’s fastest-growing Software-as-a-Service company that enables micro, small and medium businesses to increase efficiency and profitability through safe and secure digital solutions. It has three different applications — Khatabook, a digital ledger app to record debit and credit transactions, BizAnalyst which enables businesses to access, and Tally data and Cashbook, which is a bookkeeping app to manage daily expenses. It manages around 10 million merchants and 344 million customers on its platforms. Founded in 2019, Khatabook is backed by esteemed investors like Sequoia, Tencent, and RTP Global.

The majority of the users on Khatabook are self-employed business owners, predominantly retailers, and wholesalers. Their primary goal is to help MSMEs increase business efficiency by providing them with simple digitized workflows. Khatabook’s aim is to reduce the manual workload of its users by providing them with contextualized and well-designed digital systems. In order to achieve this, Khatabook needed to better understand what is and isn’t working with its products.

With Mixpanel, Khatabook gains insights into the actions of users that lead to repeat transactions, allowing them to design effective products for their customers. Insights from Mixpanel help Khatabook identify the key engagement levers in its platform, which boost adoption and retention rates.

When did you start seeking an analytics tool?

From inception, our Khatabook team upheld a culture of data-driven decision-making. To enable that culture, we needed a product analytics solution that is easy to use, intuitive, and able to measure data points like:

1. Daily Active Users
2. Monthly Active Users
3. Login to Transaction Rate
4. Weekly & Monthly Retention Rate (In terms of Ledger Entries)
5. Weekly & Monthly Retention (In terms of Payment Transactions)

In addition, we needed to uncover actionable insights into what kind of user behavior predicts long-term retention.

Why did you choose Mixpanel?

We started with Amplitude before moving to Mixpanel. Mixpanel’s simple UI and the ability to create reports from multiple data sources are what attracted us to the platform. Mixpanel’s flexible pricing plans make it easy for us to scale efficiently. It keeps the operations more optimized on our end in terms of user growth.

How has your data matured over time?

We have seen tremendous growth in the last couple of years. The first thing that naturally happened with the growth is the sheer volume of data we have had to handle. Over time our need for understanding our users have matured and as a result, the user-related information that we collect has increased. In addition, Khatabook’s ecosystem added more apps to the repertoire. That increased the volume but more importantly, it has added new dimensions and complexity to the data we have.

How is Khatabook leveraging insights from Mixpanel?

With the help of Mixpanel, we have gained a better understanding of where and how users are interacting within the platform. Another important use case for us is to know which entry point in the product is performing well. For example, which CTA (call-to-action) drives the user to a particular feature? Mixpanel’s Funnels report provided us with visibility into conversion drivers.

It’s also paramount for us to know the demographics of the users so we can personalize the experiences accordingly. This is where Mixpanel’s breakdown feature comes into the picture. A few months into using Mixpanel, we discovered an interesting trend for our BizAnalyst tool. We found that once a user has surpassed the week-four mark, there is a higher chance of them becoming long-term customers. Since then, with these insights, we were able to take action to get more users to stay on the app for a month, and since then our one-month retention rate has grown by 4.5%.

We have also been leveraging the Insights report to develop an understanding of various trends that affects our conversions. For example, we have multiple formulas running in the insights report to determine which user acquisition channels are performing well over time. Having insights into which demographics are converting better helps us determine the success of a new feature launch, and this is where the breakdown within the Insights report comes in handy.

What has been your most interesting discovery since using Mixpanel?

A fascinating discovery that we made while using Mixpanel was the uncovering of the source of drop-offs in Khatabook when a local business or user navigates through the app layout. We have multiple layouts within the app that a user can access after signing up. We noticed that when users were accessing a particular tab right after signing up, they seemed to have a lower possibility of retention in the longer term and a higher chance of early drop-off. This is something that we couldn’t have identified ourselves without the help of the data from Mixpanel. It led to quite a lot of changes and action items on our end when we were revamping our user onboarding flow.

Our team also deals with huge chunks of data on a weekly basis, so having Mixpanel as a reliable source for volume handling is simply amazing.

How else are you using Mixpanel?

Having a centralized view in the form of dashboards has been quite helpful in giving us a good overview of our business. We have multiple dashboards running with our key KPI dashboard sitting in the forefront and being leveraged by all the teams at Khatabook. We do have separate dashboards to determine engagement and retention trends across our applications. Whenever we build a new dashboard it has to be either feature, user, or team specific; this helps us break data into smaller chunks to make it easily consumable and actionable.

Which teams at Khatabook are actively using Mixpanel?

Analytics, Product & Growth teams are currently the primary users. We are already working to increase the usage across other teams as well.

Khatabook has grown over the last few years. How has Mixpanel been able to scale along with your growth?

Since our association with Mixpanel began, there has been an enormous increase in the volume as well as the breadth of the data we consume.

Some of the things that have worked very well for us over time:

• Seamless experience in terms of integration and any support requirements
• No issues regarding the performance or data handling in general due to increased load, and the platform remains fast & efficient

What advice would you give to upcoming startups who are looking to implement product analytics?

For a startup looking to find scale, the tools and technology evolve and it takes a lot of scrutinies as well as trial and error to establish what works best. Having said that, it is paramount that we start leveraging the learnings from data as early in the journey as possible.

There is absolutely no doubt that the experience and domain knowledge of the folks building the product will more often than not guide you in the right direction, but it helps to have true data as a reliable source of hypothesis validation.

Thousands of companies use Mixpanel to build better products. See what Mixpanel can do for your team. Create your free account today.