Paul Kemp: Yes, and just to ensure, for those who are listening whilst driving - you can go to theappguy.co it's episode #513, with Andrew and Robert, and you'll see links to that site. I'm also wondering... You've seen a lot of app developers - appreneurs, as I like to say - start business, who have their apps, and I wondered what you feel like the most important metrics that they should be looking at are, in terms of what you've learned over the years.

Robert Kwok: When you're developing an app, it's great to monitor how your app is doing over time. One of the most critical moments is really around when you first release an app - tracking the first 72 hours after your release. The metrics there that you really want to track are: how many people are adopting that version, how many people are upgrading, and then being able to understand why they are or aren't adopting it.

One of the metrics a lot of our customers track is the crash rate of their app, which is basically the number of sessions that end in a crash. That's often a very good indicator; it's highly correlated with app store ratings, which help drive downloads, so it's kind of a feedback cycle there.

The other metric a lot of companies are tracking today are app start time. Just thinking about it, if you're using an app and it takes ten seconds to load, you're probably going to give up at some point and stop using that app and maybe use a competitor's app. Those are two metrics that a lot of companies closely track, especially when they're releasing new versions.

Andrew Levy: And just to pile on top of that, those performance metrics impact your business, and I think what many first-time app publishers make mistake of is they focus on conversion rates in certain flows in the app. Those are obviously important, but they'd really need be focused on engagement and retention first and foremost, before they ramp up marketing campaigns... As well as those performance metrics that Rob mentioned, because what's going to end up happening is you're going to spend a ton of money to get users, they're going to have a poor user experience and you're going to have a leaky bucket. You're going to lose a ton of them, your acquisition cost will go up, and it just won't be a happy ending. You definitely need to make sure you optimize those metrics.

Paul Kemp: This is great, because it's really compounding a lot of the information we've got from the past amazing founders, and certainly I've had a first-time experience of what you mentioned as being the leaky bucket, where you've got tens of thousands of users downloading the app for the first time, but maybe the conversion is not right... In terms of a conversion rate, what do you think is a good conversion rate? From landing on the app store page to then clicking the Download button.

Andrew Levy: It's tough to say... It can be very vertical-specific. Frankly, our metrics don't focus on the attribution piece. There's tracking of once they open the app, but then there's also "How do you connect? Where are the users coming from?" and those conversion rates. We focus mostly on, you know, once the app is opened what are the metrics that you should look at.

There's some data out there - if you're interested in this topic, I would look up mobile app attribution of Google.

Paul Kemp: Yes. And as we draw to a close, I'm wondering what exciting stuff you're working on now, in terms of future updates or anything that's coming out going forward.

Andrew Levy: Yes, we continue to add new types of data science capabilities into our platform. We're really driving towards this idea of being able to say, "Hey, if you fix these three issues, then your churn will decrease by this amount, or your engagement will increase, or your revenue will increase." So being able to proactively recommend areas that teams should focus in on is a key area for us.

We also continue to add other performance metrics. We just launched UI hangs - or you can call it app hangs and out-of-memory analysis - into our product. We're also adding some custom reporting for enterprise clients... So a lot of new dashboards that teams can play around with.

Robert Kwok: We're helping companies understand the wider user experience of the app. So not just knowing when the app crashes, but when the user gets frustrated by the app, or when it's draining battery or killing your data plan.

Paul Kemp: It's really exciting, because I can imagine that you're also looking at artificial intelligence or machine learning or something, to understand where in the code the crashes are happening, and perhaps give developers more insights into the parts of the code that are crashing. Are you looking into that stuff?

Andrew Levy: Yes, we've done some of that already. We launched a product called Smart Crash Search, where we identify similar root causes across errors. One of the common problems that people have is there's a lot of noise generated from these apps, so you need to understand where should your team be investing their time and what are the related problems. So we actually give a probability score in this new product to help you understand how similar is this issue, compared to all these other issues. It's a really interesting and unique capability of ours.

Robert Kwok: We also launched something recently called the 3rd Party SDK Analysis. One of the common problems when you're developing a mobile app is to figure out which SDKs you should integrate. Often times those will cause performance issues like crashes or slowdowns. We launched a product a couple months ago that allows you to recognize if a crash is actually caused by a third-party SDK.

Paul Kemp: Fascinating. Sadly, we've got to draw to a close now... But I'm wondering, do you feel like we've touched on everything in regards to what you wanted to talk about Apteligent? Is there anything else you want to add for those who are thinking about using you?

Andrew Levy: One thing I'd say is we have a free tier as well; we do work with some of the largest app publishers across the globe, but we also work with folks in a garage somewhere, looking to build the next big app. So we have a free tier, we also have a middle tier called JumpStart for small businesses, and our enterprise tier. I'd encourage anyone that's interested to check us out. It's very easy and quick to get started, at Apteligent.com

Paul Kemp: Wonderful. Andrew, Robert, thank you both for coming on The App Guy Podcast and sharing your story about Apteligent and what you can achieve with the software. I highly recommend the appster tribe go and check you out. How best can people reach out and connect with you both? What is the best way of getting in touch?

Andrew Levy: If you e-mail info [at] Apteligent.com, it will be sent out to us. Or you can just contact us directly - Andrew [at] Apteligent.com and Rob [at] Apteligent.com.

Paul Kemp: Great.