A startup should invest in data collection and analytics early on, with your product ideally having data collection capabilities as soon as the first public release in order to help you understand your audience and take important business decisions reliably. Having such data means you will be able to direct resources where it matters, from which features your development team should focus on, to how you should market your product for optimum results. Without it, your decision making will be mostly based on gut feelings and other external data such as download statistics which do not reflect the true picture on how your product is performing. 

Usage Intelligence makes it easy for startups to collect product usage data without having to invest precious time on an in-house call home infrastructure and reporting platform. Integrating the Usage Intelligence SDK into your product will take no more than 30 minutes, and this will immediately give you access to several reports out-of-the-box including:

• Runtime Intelligence: Activity overview of how much time your users actually spent interacting with your product in terms of active days, number of sessions and runtime hours.
• Churn Analysis: Reports based on the lifetime of lost and active users to help you identify how users engaged with your product before churning away
• Distribution Reports: View the geographical location of your users, what versions/editions/builds they are running, the type of license and its status, as well as how these distributions are changing over time.
• Architecture Reports: Get data on the devices that your product is installed on, including CPU, memory, operating system architecture and language, display resolution, device type etc.
• Feature Usage and Event Tracking: Get detailed information on what features are popular with your user base and how users interact with various functionalities in your application at each stage in their lifecycle.

Apart from this, Usage Intelligence offers further capabilities such as license key management and in-app messaging, marketing and user feedback collection through its ReachOut™ in-app messaging service. This means that once time passes and you start to understand what it is that you would like to know more about, it will be a painless transition to go from collecting the bare essentials to more advanced analytics. See How to Price Software Licensing for further reading on how much effort startups should invest into data analytics and how to strike a balance in your data collection.