Session Recording for Web Projects
TL;DR
More than web analytics, see what the users are experiencing.
Some Product Tools that we can selfhost.
Compared to some Forms/Surveys and Waiting lists OSS options.
Intro
Lately I got to know https://www.awesome-homelab.com/item/highlightio
If you got your SaaS reachable by potential users.
Or you are a PdM or a DA with product vision…
You will want to know what it works and what not.
But for real.
What are the users experiencing.
If you have worked on some e-commerce related startups, you might have used Amplitude.
But there are some alternatives
This is a client that reveals that it actually wants: and with these tools, you will know this!
We all need help, but how much help do we need? And to do…what?
You can test how much others value your help by putting a price tag to it (pain point).
Who ever pays, believe that is getting »> value from your time that they paid for.
Product Tools for Record and Replay the Web
How to build products that last?
Product that people want to keep using and build a brand?
There are some product tools like https://docs.uxwizz.com/ who follow the pay once own forever.
Or Matomo, which we know as open source web analytics tools, and has a premium hosted optopn with a plugin to do session recording.
Luckily, we have fully OSS options to do session recording:
MIT | Record and replay the web
OpenReplay
Adding OpenReplay to a Astro Site 📌
Go to https://app.openreplay.com/login
npm i @openreplay/trackerCopy the json before the </head>, normally in BaseLayout.astro
PostHog
https://jalcocert.github.io/JAlcocerT/product-tools/#posthog
Then, you will need to add this kind of snippet before the /head:
<script>
//somethingsomething
posthog.init('phc_someid', {
api_host: 'https://eu.i.posthog.com',
person_profiles: 'identified_only', // or 'always' to create profiles for anonymous users as well
})
</script>Conclusions
Now you are ready to rock your career within startups.
Bring to the table a discussion about how to measure SaaS performance with real insights, not assumptions of what part of the service the users are really enjoying and using.
Astuto
If after all, you want to get a mechanism to get feedback from clients:
- https://astuto.io/
- Let users request feature and create a RoadMap accordingly
The open source tool to understand your customers and build a better product
FAQ
F/OSS to Interact with Audience
This year seems to be the year of: uv, makefile and pocketbase.
Get more ideas at https://medevel.com/open-source-survey-tools-2/
You can have also your own DIY survey / forms tool for your Saas by using PB.
Forms
Formbricks
Just use formbricks.
COnfigure it properly, and you can use formbricks to be a waiting2landing questionare while you are figuring out the PMF for your next microSaaS: https://github.com/JAlcocerT/waiting-to-landing
Around one year ago I was making a post and touched formbricks
heyform
HeyForm is an open-source form builder that allows anyone to create engaging conversational forms for surveys, questionnaires, quizzes, and polls. No coding skills required.
ohmyform
DIY Forms with PB
When Pocketbase has a SMTP configured, you can make it validate the emails is capturing:
Why with PocketBase
Potentially: PB + SSG is great to validate ideas.
FAST!
Just because I like to keep the tech stack as simple as possible.
And because Im lazy to maintain a lot of back-end code.
Additionally, you wont have a limit on how many users can be on your list.