Productivity company, Shift, uses Mixpanel to find north-star metrics that influence how its users convert—helping increase its userbase by 10X year-over-year.

700% increase in paid user base within 4 months
10X year-over-year growth
Using Signal to find north-star metrics

Being able to see the whole user lifecycle, and then go back and determine which campaign attracted them, allows you to slowly build a narrative around every type of user. Our market is really broad, so knowing we appeal to anyone with two or more email accounts was huge for us in driving growth.

Nadia Tatlow, General Manager at Shift

Shift is a desktop productivity workstation that helps users switch between multiple apps, Mail, Calendar, and Drive accounts. By unifying users’ messaging platforms, apps, and email accounts, Shift is able to streamline workflows for consumers and businesses. Shift is part of a startup division within Redbrick, a Victoria-based software company.


With a foundation in software development, Redbrick initially built its analytics solution for Shift in-house. The team soon realized they needed more power and flexibility. Nadia Tatlow, General Manager at Shift, wanted a solution that could work for the whole team. She enlisted help from Shift’s Director of Product, Michael Foucher, to identify a solution. They needed a product that could help identify a north-star metric for increasing the number of users to paid accounts, and build campaigns and messaging that could nudge people towards that north-start behavior.

Using Signal to find a north-star metric for purchases

With the goal of increasing the number of users upgrading to a paid plan, Michael needed to identify a north-star metric to help him drive users to purchase. He was about to hire a data scientist when he noticed Mixpanel’s Signal report had enough data to run correlation analysis. It took him no time at all to run the report and identify his north star. “We, of course, had ideas that we thought would be potential purchase signals. As it turned out, one of our guesses—setting up multiple email accounts—was right, but we needed data to confirm that instinct before putting resources behind it.”

Optimizing campaigns against Signal’s finding

Following this discovery, marketing and product worked together to reduce blockers preventing someone from adding two accounts. Additionally, using customers who completed the north star behavior, Nadia built Lookalike Audiences for her Facebook and Google campaigns. As Nadia said, “There are 1.5 billion Gmail users who could use Shift and could manage one email account or two. Having these Lookalike Audiences helped us focus on the right people a lot faster than we would have without that as our conversion point.” As a result of these highly targeted campaigns, Shift was able to grow its paying user base by 700% within four months of implementing Mixpanel.


By using Mixpanel, Shift was able to determine its north-start metric and increase year-over-year growth by 10%. Shift’s Product and Marketing departments continue to look to Mixpanel on a daily basis to catch trends and shifts in user behavior. They are looking forward to relying on Signal to surface insights on how to attract more users so that they can continue their 10X YoY growth as they enter 2019.


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