Learn / Case Studies / Hussle
How Hussleâs âfolder of painâ helps improve their product and spot a bug a week
Lukeâa Product Lead at Hussle âuses Hotjar to survey every churned user, spot revenue-damaging bugs, and ensure each new launch runs smoothly.
What is Hussle?
Hussle is an online marketplace for gyms and spas. (Luke describes Hussle as the âAirbnb for gymsâ.) Essentially, Hussle connects you with all the best gyms in your area, and provides day passes or MultiGym passes that include digital fitness apps.
Luke, who joined Hussle 18 months ago as a Product Lead, jokes that his role is basically to âship thingsââa sentiment most product people can probably agree with.
But, of course, itâs more nuanced than that. He describes his role as prioritizing what to build next:
âI help shape what we ship by prioritizing why we should build certain things over other thingsâbased on both user and business needs.â
A typical day for Luke involves checking his inbox and Slack channels to see if Hotjar has identified anything he needs to act on before he heads off to daily standups with his tech team. Sometimes Hotjar alerts him to things he wasnât expecting, but Luke specifically looks for:
Churn interviews: survey responses from users who have left Hussle
New feature analysis: recordings of people using Hussleâs latest features
Broken user flows: spotting users getting stuck and figuring out why
Discovering bugs: identifying issues he wasnât aware of before
Let's take a deep dive into each point as Luke explains how Hotjar gives him the product experience insights he needs to build a better product for his users.
How Luke used Hotjar Surveys to interview over 1,000 churning users
Like most product managers, Luke cares deeply when a user decides to cancel their subscription: itâs his responsibility to build features that delight users and keep them hooked on the product. If users are leaving, he needs to know why.
Thatâs where Hotjar Surveys come in. Hotjar automatically sends a survey to every churned Hussle user right after they cancel their subscription.
The timing is essential here. Luke could send a survey to everyone at the end of the month, but that would be too late. To capture reliable feedback, he needs to hear from users as theyâre leaving.
At the time of our chat, Luke had collected over 1,000 responses and made the effort to read them all.
"I don't like to get emails from Hotjar saying 'Here's another Survey response' because it means someone has canceled! But it's vital information, and I read every single one."
Each survey response tells its own story and can help Luke identify small bugs, or discover larger UX or PX (product experience) problems. To help make sense of all the survey data, Luke exports responses into a CSV before clustering common reasons into themes.
Initially, this process revealed three key churn reasons:
Hussle's service was too expensive
The user moved location and no longer needed the service
The user bought a contract directly with a gym
That last point stood out to Luke and to Jamie Owens, Director of Fitness Partnerships at Hussle:
âHussleâs two key principles are increasing participation in physical activity and generating revenue for operators. We know from other research that 26% of users who use Hussle go onto join the gym directly. We wanted to professionalize this service.â
Luke spends eight minutes a day watching Recordings and fixes one bug a week.
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Hotjarâs cancellation surveys helped echo similar research findings and ultimately led to the creation of a new Hussle product. The Membership Conversion Service (which Hussle is piloting with some gyms now) offers users the ability to buy gym memberships through Hussle. Luke adds:
âWe know there are users who land on our site who might not need a MultiGym pass. Our hypothesis is that we get a lot of visits from users who are looking for a Gym Membership. So these churn reasons helped inform a brand new product offering. We ask users a few questions on-site, and based on their answers, we recommend them a personalized pass.
If theyâre more suitable for a Gym Membership, then we want to help them buy one. This not only supports our gym partners but also reduces our churn. This helps us understand what our customers want and frames Hussle as a one-stop-shop for any fitness pass.â
It wasnât Lukeâs intention to use exit surveys for this reason, but it shows why they're so important to have, in the first place. Ultimately, they're likely to reveal insights. Luke says:
âWe send out these surveys to every single churned user and probably get a few insights every single day.â
What Luke learns from watching eight minutes of Hotjar Recordings every day.
Product managers tend to obsess over user journeys, and Luke is no different. Every time Hussle launches a new feature, heâs desperate to see if people are using it in the way he expected.
âHave users clicked on the right button? Did they visit the right URL? Did they understand the concept?â These are questions Luke needs to answer after every launch, and he uses Hotjar Recordings to help.
The concept behind the Personalised Pass Builder is to ask users a series of questions and, based on their responses, recommend the best pass to meet their needs:
For example, recently the folks at Hussle launched a Personalised Pass Builder.
If they want to go to a single gym lots of times, theyâre perfect for a gym membership.
If they need access to more than one gym near home and work because they travel frequently, they can build a MultiGym pass and select the gyms they want to access.
When the Personalised Pass Builder launched, Luke dived into Hotjar.
âI open up Recordings to watch people using the new feature. Immediately Iâll spot things I wasnât expectingâstuff like:
Why is that user hitting the back button at checkout?
Why did this user immediately change their options?
Why isnât this user heading to the next step?
Do users understand they can build a pass, or why we automatically include other gyms when you add one to your pass?
"I build hypotheses around each of these and test them in future product iterations.â
For Luke, shipping the product is only the start. Heâs keen on continuous discovery and wants to continue to improve the product week on week. To do this, he couples Hotjar Recordings with user testing: âItâs a powerful thingâI spot insights in Hotjar, implement a change, then test with users.â
With Recordings, Luke and his team have the data they need to make dozens of small but vital changes. They donât wait for feedback to make its way back to them organically. They learn from the user, in the moment, to create a product that delivers.
"I try and watch eight minutes of Recordings, every single day. Sometimes it's more, sometimes it's less. I think it helps you be really close to the user. Rather than guess, I can watchâand this helps us stay focused on building whatâs right for the user."
Lukeâs Slack channel of âabsolute painâ (and why you need one too)
With thousands of users at Hussle, there are bound to be a few unhappy customers.
Luke says the goal at Hussle isnât to make every experience perfect (thatâs impossible) but rather to identify problems quickly so they donât happen again.
So, how does Luke sift through hundreds of hours of Hotjar Session Recordings? By setting up some basic filters:
Rage clicks + Slack integration = Prioritize the right changes fast
 With Hotjarâs Slack integration, Luke can send every Recording containing a rage click straight to a specific Hussle Slack channel, which Luke calls âa folder of absolute pain.â
Luke isnât alone in the Slack group; heâs joined by Hussleâs Customer Experience Manager, who watches rage click Recordings and quickly checks if there's a problem affecting all users. She does this by checking support tickets and looking at a Heatmap of the page to see an aggregate of where users click, scroll, and move.
If the problem is affecting all users, she lets Luke know, and he puts it on a Monday board to deal with the following day.
âI have no idea how many hours we saved or how many users weâve helped as a result, but we couldnât spot these issues without Hotjar.â
Quick disclaimer: Hotjar isnât just used for a folder of absolute pain. Luke also has a Slack group called âPeople having a great time - via Hotjarâ, showing users behaving exactly how Hussle wants them toâa perfect antidote to keep morale high!
How to spot and solve product bugs every single week
At Hussle, Luke is responsible for users signing up for the corporate Hussle subscription. To capture feedback, Luke placed Hotjar's Incoming Feedback widget on the signup page. The feedback widget helped him spot a major problem:
Users were saying âitâs impossible to register.â
In the past, Luke would have to get in touch with these users via email or phone to understand what happened. But with Hotjar, he can grab the userâs ID then head to Recordings to see precisely what happened.
âThe problem became clear after watching Recordings. The user was trying to sign up for their corporate Hussle subscription. But Hussle hadnât received the payroll number from that user yet. We need the userâs employer to send over the payroll number to prove they work for the firm and qualify them for the employee perks.â
This only affected a handful of corporate clients, but thatâs potentially hundreds of people having the worst possible user experience with Hussle. Fortunately, Luke caught the issue early on with Hotjar. Heâs now implemented changes to the error message that tells the user they may need to wait a few days, and to get in touch with their HR department to send over the payroll number.
One of the impressive things about Hussleâs team is the speed at which they work.
âWithout Hotjar, it would take me at least two weeks to find the issueâand thatâs assuming I find it in the first place. With Hotjar, we found the issue last Wednesday and weâve already got a solution ready to publish in development on Friday.â
With Hotjarâs help, Luke was able to spot a serious issue before it impacted hundreds of users.
I find Hotjar gives me empathy for the user. I can see their experience directly and notice how frustrating it can be, and this gives me real empathy.
You know that your registration form works. So when you get feedback that it isnât working for a user and you then watch the recordings, it makes you think âWell actually, the user can't do it.â They're not wrong.
And we need to take it seriously. Without Hotjar, it's harder for me and the team to empathize in this way.
You canât help but think Hussleâs users are in good hands. With Luke at the helm, itâs clear theyâll be using a product thatâs uniquely designed to match their needs.
And thatâs the real story here.
By using Hotjarâs full range of features, Luke can continuously learn from Hussle users. Heâs first to know when thereâs a problem and can prioritize improvements that will really help. This is great for Hussleâbut itâs even better for Hussleâs users.
With Hotjar, Lukeâs been able to:
Identify a bug that would have stopped dozens of users from buying
Collect over 1,000 Survey responses from users who canceled their subscription
Watch over 73,000 seconds of Recordings (including the infamous âfolder of painâ)
Spot and fix a bug once a week
Downgrade to Hotjarâs free plan during the pandemic while gyms were closed (without losing any data) before returning to the paid Business plan
âWe really love Hotjar. I share all the insights I find with the team. We get the Customer Success Manager to watch Recordings. UX person to watch recordings. Devs watch recordings. Itâs a team effort. Itâs democratic learning."
Luke spends eight minutes a day watching Recordings, and fixes one bug a week.
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