As of last night Guestlist has officially completed our first month of business. To mark this occasion I thought I’d share a funny story with you.

In addition to cleaning up workflows and building great new features, we’ve also been adding more analytics to give us better insight into how people are actually using Guestlist. As I was working on this last night I stumbled on a mistake we’d made in rolling out the payment system.

When we started charging on July 12, we grandfathered all published events that our beta users had previously created but not completed. However, we also have this great copy feature to help customers who run repeat events. I think you can see where this is going. Copied events were inheriting the grandfather status and hence were not being charged commission!

As it turns out, a lot more customers were using the event copy feature than I had thought. In fact, this little oversight cost us about 20% of our first month’s revenue! Well, better learning this now than twelve months from now.

I only noticed this because I was investing time in understanding how people were actually using our app. Before this I had incorrectly assumed that not many people were copying events and as a result did not have that in mind when implementing our payment system.

So do yourself a favor and get to know your application usage data a little better. Not only will it help you build a better product, you might just learn something that surprises you.