Startup Story #10: Kishan on how UXCam is capturing and analysing User Behaviour

Studying Business for 6 years has taught me one thing- ‘Customer is the King!’ Your product, marketing, strategy, planning, promotions, development and every other thing should revolve around making your customer happy and satisfied. After all, they provide bread and butter to every company.

Today, consumers are bombarded with alternatives. They have at least five closely-competing options for any product or service, which turns their attention span short and brand loyalty weak. Hence, it has become extremely important for companies to understand where a potential buyer is present, what is grabbing his/her attention and how he/she behaves and reacts to things. As companies are now moving to website and mobile first concept, analysing consumer behaviour and experience for these platforms has become extremely crucial.

UXCam is offering just the right solution which enables developers and UX designers to test user behaviour and experience and get the answer of ‘why’. This promising startup made it to reputed programs like 500 Startups and Microsoft Venture, and is constantly added new clients to its portfolio.

In conversation with Kishan Gupta, CEO of UXCam.

Q: Tell us more about UXCam?

A: We help companies improve user experience by pinpointing issues through our analytics and letting them watch videos of their users interacting with the app.

Q: Throw some light on the working of UXCam?

A: It’s very similar to Google Analytics. A developer downloads a code from our website and adds it to their apps/website. Our code then works on the background and capture user interaction data such as screen video, touch points. The developer can now login to UXCam website where they can review the issues and see videos of how their users are using their apps/website and fix issues they might be having.

Q: Where did your vision for UXCam come from?
A: The founding team worked as lead iOS developer at BBC and a Research engineer in mobile usability and testing at University College London. At UCL, we were supporting their service of providing user-experience (UX) testing to start-ups and large enterprises. We saw the trouble UX designers had trawling around the university to ask students to test the apps – and the poor results this was giving them. We were able to relate to these issues as we had the same problems as app developers. We took up the challenge of developing a tool to improve the UX testing experience and the quality of results. Fast forward a year and we are now able to do UX testing with thousands of users, get insights without having to watch all of the recordings and collaborate with the team to build beautiful product.
Q: What sets UXCam apart from the traditional web analytics?

A: Traditional analytics tells you ‘What’ and they are very important for quantitative analysis. They give data such as how many visitors are quitting on the checkout page.

UXCam is for qualitative analysis of your product. It shows ‘Why’.

Watching a user navigate through your checkout page can give you insights on why they are dropping off. Perhaps they can’t find how to increase the quantity or the button is off-screen on their device. Could be thousands of different reason the product owner have no clue about. UXCam can help solve these issues.

Q: Put some light on the technology used to build UXCam?
A: Our SDK is built using Objective C, Java and Javascript for iOS, Android and Web respectively. The frontend is in Javascript with Mongo as our database. We have spent huge amount of time in optimization of the SDK code. It’s hard when you think about it, creating a video in the background without any performance penalty.

Q: Please throw some light on your target audience and how you reach out to them?

A: Our target audience are developers and UX designers.

We have been very active on the developer community which has helped a lot. Participating in an accelerator program has helped with visibility as well. Content marketing has been working quite well which we haven’t done enough but plan on doing more of it now.

Q: What was technically the most challenging part of developing UXCam?

A: The biggest challenge was creating videos of >40 frames per second on a background thread  but still making the tool compatible with app-store and google play. We focused hugely on the optimization to solve this issue.

Q: What are your marketing plans for UXCam?

A: A lot of content marketing, Organizing developer hackathon events and being present at various events where developers hang out.

Q: What are your strengths?

A: All of us in our team are developers including myself (except for our contractor UX designers). This has been good and bad. Good because we understand the pain developers face and basically we are building the product for ourselves.

Bad in the sense, I had to learn ABC of business and I had to step out of being a developer to few different hats. Seems I have learned  a bit of it now that we doing fairly well.

Q: Where do you see UXCam in the next 5 years?
A: We believe in giving users a great experience and our goal is to empower every developer with all the right set of usability tools to achieve this. Currently developers are companies do very less of user experience testing because it’s expensive and there aren’t any good tools for it.

In long-term we want to be the ‘Google of User Experience’. We want to be the de-facto tool that a developer uses and iterates with to improve their user’s experience.

Q: What are the 3 latest trends that excites you the most?

A:- UX: UX already has a place in product development but it’s going to be even bigger. To compete with other product companies has to invest on user experience. So it’s great to be building a company in this space.

– 3D printing becoming mainstream.

– Technology and entrepreneurship in emerging markets: I am super excited about the entrepreneurship emerging from the developing countries. Great billion dollar companies are not just from Silicon valley but every part of the world. Investors should be tapping on the potential of technology and entrepreneurship from these emerging countries more so than they do now.

Q: What is the biggest hurdle that you faced or are still facing?

A: Fundraising had been a hurdle during the early phase of the company. It took so much of the time and energy and the team got a bit disconnected amongst each other and concerned about the future of the company. Fortunately we crossed that but it’s hard to say that it wont come back again.

Q: What are you most excited about at the moment?
A: We have been working crazily for the last two month on V2 of our product where we have incorporated customer feedbacks, added enhanced features and done integration with various analytics providing partners. The response has been amazing on our beta users so looking forward very eagerly on the full roll out.

Q: Any word of advice for all the startups out there who are trying to make it big like UXCam.

A: Put your product in front of your customers while you are developing (this could be a prototype, HTML only without functionality). Be data driven and stay lean.

Get the best people on the team and if you can’t find them then seriously consider not doing that till you find them (if doing it yourself is not in the bucket).

Also, you have to realize that being an entrepreneur means you’re also part of a culture focused on giving back. If a startup can keep that mentality in the forefront of their mind, karma comes back.