Company

Video communication app mmhmm was founded in San Francisco in 2020, and built out ambitiously during the first year of Covid. 2020, after all, was the year that video happened to so many of us, and mmhmm is the desktop app that lets you leave an even better impression than you could even if you were meeting in real life.

mmhmm’s founder was dissatisfied with how industry leaders Meet and Zoom presented the video paradigm and resolved to create a new way to communicate via video. They designed mmhmm as a tool for controlling your virtual environment; you can live alongside your content in a way that doesn’t ask your audience to choose between the content or the presenter as Meet and Zoom do.

While presenting, you can add other stuff from your computer, such as other browser windows. You can add GIFs and video files. You can mirror second screens and devices for product demos. You can add fun presenter effects like FBI informant mode or VH1 readjust 90s glitch, a little drizzle effect, or you can go translucent. “We built mmhmm to add a little joy to our virtual presentations,” says the company’s website.

Getting started

mmhmm CEO and founder Phil Libin is very number savvy, says Jeremy Yuan, Product Marketing & Analytics at mmhmm. “We knew we wanted an analytics tool that could give us meaningful products, data and insights, right from the get-go.”

mmhmm investigated a number of analytics tools and were drawn to Mixpanel initially by its cost structure.

“We saw other tools with fine free features, but the features that you really wanted were behind a paywall and you had to sign up for a big ticket expense to get those,” says Yuan. “Mixpanel allows you to graduate that spend, and that was the thing that spoke to us initially. But once we began using it, it was just really easy to keep using.”

Yuan notes that Mixpanel allowed mmhmm to make early and informed bets about their onboarding process and to take a look at what users were doing over time. Use of the tool has increased over time, and today, the company uses Mixpanel in a variety of ways, including;

• If users are presenting individually or with a copilot
• Are people getting more value of MP4 recording or interactive recordings
• What premium tools are being used (e.g. rooms, custom appearances, effects)
• How many and what kind of slides a user is adding
• What geographies have the highest product usage

mmhmm also uses Mixpanel to track the web layer–the things that happen in the browser (change in subscription settings, for example) related to the product. This is also where they have intel on how you’re using the product as a presenter and then insights into how it’s being consumed.

Why mmhmm loves Mixpanel

Setting goals. mmhmm is now out of beta and premium features are now available to everyone for free. All users can access those features for one hour a day, while Premium subscribers get unlimited access. “Being able to draw correlations between product use and successful behavior (like upgrading) is a big win for us,” says Yuan, “and allows us to set concrete goals and milestones for our product.”

Time savings. Mixpanel gives mmhmm what Yuan calls a “day-to-day quality of life win,” enabling the company to easily answer people’s questions on an ad hoc basis. “Doing product analytics can be fairly time-consuming, but Mixpanel makes it easy, so we can get back quickly to the big important work.”

Simple, valuable integrations. mmhmm pipes raw event data to Mixpanel for event- and user-based analyses. Mixpanel also allows them to funnel that data into BigQuery for custom dashboarding and analysis via Data Studio.

“Our CEO likes to use custom analysis to measure where inactive, low-value or high-value users are going. With the analysis, we’re able to derive valuable user observations and product goals, which is really important for us. The fact that we can use Mixpanel alongside our custom work offers a really powerful one-two punch that I don’t know that we would have been able to easily get otherwise. Doing analytics without Mixpanel isn’t impossible, but we’re a small team and we’re not data scientists, and so if we tried to do product analytics solely on a custom basis, it would have taken us much longer.”

Most used features

Insights: Insights represents some 70% of the Mixpanel work that mmhmm conducts. “Most of the ad hoc reports happen in Insights, and most of our dashboards depend on saved Insights reports.” Yuan points to the ability to break down events by user properties and event properties as being particularly useful, especially when thinking about internationalization and seeing product usage in one country versus another, or total premium conversions broken down by country.

Signal: “We have premium subscription events and premium trials that we need to better understand because that’s vital to the health of our company, and the Mixpanel signal report helps us do that.”

Cohorts: “The Funnel report breaks down groups of people who stick around and people who drop off. I can right-click either of those groups and save them as a cohort and then do another layer of analysis based on those groups. That’s really powerful.”

Dashboards: mmhmm runs two main dashboards: the user dashboard and the product usage dashboard. “Our dashboards are where the reports that we just keep coming back to and we want to keep having a read on, this is where that work lives,” offers Yuan.

Looking ahead

“Getting Mixpanel in early has helped us unlock quick, iterative feedback loops,” says Yuan. “We’re only seven months in, but I’m excited to see how this product unravels itself to us over time. We’re stoked with it so far, and there’s still a lot to see and learn and discover.”