When serial entrepreneur Ed Giardina was building out one of his several online ventures, he needed a way to track user errors and get to the root of the problem as fast as possible.
But being a startup, Giardina did not have the resources to spend days monitoring Google Analytics, studying heat maps or putting together reports.
His problem at one startup would ultimately lead to the creation of another.
Hawk is a tool that allows companies to monitor any web-based application and not only get alerts when users make certain errors, but also see a video recording of the error as if they were standing directly over the user’s shoulders and seeing exactly what they did.
“This was built for people who don’t have teams to study data, but want to know what is happening on site."
“What we found was that it was hard to recreate errors on a web app,” Giardina, who is also the founder of NowRenting, told Rhode Island Inno. “We want to make sure users are not experiencing errors at a critical time, whether it’s entering their credit card information for payment or signing up for an account. We hate to find out at one of those particular moments, they experience an error and the user leaves the app because of that.”
Hawk can be used by any browser website, single page app, brochure site or hosting site such as Wix. When companies opt to use the tool, they can select what type of errors they want to be alerted about — it could be a console error, network error or something that goes wrong with Javascript, among other issues.
Those alerts can be sent via email, through push notifications or to content management systems such as Trello or Slack.
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When an error occurs, whoever is using Hawk can configure the platform to send a video recording of what the user did when that error happened. The tool also allows companies to get a live video feed of what a user is doing as well.
Hawk doesn’t only track errors, but also has the capability to provide insight on traffic such as when users sign up, site visits, time spent on the website, page views, Google traffic insights and much more.
While the video feed of user interaction does raise privacy questions, Giardina said Hawk by default does not capture sensitive data such as passwords, credit card information and social security numbers. Furthermore, companies using the tool can go into Hawk and direct it not to capture other types of sensitive information that might emerge.
“We want to make sure we are following along with the rules in Europe,” said Giardina, referring to the continent’s General Data Protection Regulation. “We give all the functionality to the end user to collect or not collect data.”
The technology behind Hawk did not come overnight.
Giardina said his team started off very light, building on a single server, but soon realized there was too much traffic because of how intensive video creation proved to be. The Hawk team would go on to add more layers, using the full scalability of Amazon Web Services to off load expensive services of the tool.
The company makes money by charging on a pay as you go basis. Companies can upload a certain amount of money to their account and Hawk charges 40 cents for each minute of live or recorded video.
However, users can customize the time that video is taken to keep charges down and basic traffic information is free.
Giardina said the company, which went live last August, is focused on actively acquiring users, getting feedback and seeing if they are moving in the right direction.
“This was built for people who don’t have teams to study data, but want to know what is happening on site,” he said. “It’s really built for smaller organizations.”
