Chris Messina

Literal - Multiplayer app analytics

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Top Hunter

What is a multiplayer app analytics tool, you might ask? Literal pulls together app screens, analytics and API calls, and live data into a multiplayer whiteboard so app teams can discuss literally the same thing — all at the same time!

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Chi-Kai Chien
👋 Hello! I’m Chi-Kai, co-founder of Literal. We’re super excited to release our product and share it with the Product Hunt community! Think of Literal as Figma meets Mixpanel—collaboration and insight by literally looking at the product you’re shipping. 🔍 VISUAL MAP OF YOUR APP We use computer vision on screen recordings to quickly build a visual map of any app’s screens. In fact, anyone can try that today—no developer required! (Click here to try it, no signup required) 🎩 IT’S MAGIC 🐇 The real magic is when you call your developer and get her to hook up our SDK and connect to your analytics (currently supporting Mixpanel and Amplitude). That map turns into a sequential heatmap of opportunities for you to smooth out, improve, and literally make your app 10x better. 🛟 HOW LITERAL HELPS 🪄 Review ANY conversion funnel instantly—with screens and data 🔍 Share and review progress with screens, analytics events, and API calls 🤝 Visually validate the analytics events you need for your A/B tests 🚀 Build data literacy—see analytics with your screens ⭐ Keep everyone in sync with a visual source of truth 👥 Onboard new employees with maps for key UX flows 🤓 I GOT THIS FAR, NOW WHAT? Create a visual map of your app—no signup required. See example maps with analytics events and API calls. Special thanks to @chrismessina for hunting us! You’re a gem: product strategy, positioning, and marketing advice, all rolled into one—the complete package! 🙏 Thanks for checking this out. We’d love to get your feedback in the comments below👇🏼.
Paul Rusyn
@chrismessina @chikai Congrats on the launch and good luck 🍀 If you need some help with the logo and brand identity, feel free to contact me!
Chi-Kai Chien
@pavell2l Thanks Pavel! I might need to take you up on that!
Paul Rusyn
@chikai Thank you too. You can check our works via the link: https://logolivery.com/
Chi-Kai Chien
@fares_aktouf thank you for your support!
Chi-Kai Chien
@pavell2l will do, thanks!
Chris Messina
Top Hunter
Hunter
This is so fun — but also so... useful?? The combination of computer vision and network traffic analysis to automagically build funnels from the literal screens in your mobile app is... genius. And the layering on multi-player analytics? C'mon! More people need to discover this!
Chi-Kai Chien
@chrismessina You're too kind. Thanks for all your sage advice, especially to newb makers!
Raph
@chrismessina Loved getting feedback on some of our new features on the roadmap. Thanks for helping spread the word!
Alex Bird
@chrismessina Thanks for all your help, Chris!
Raph
👋 Hey there! 👋 I’m Raphael, co-founder of Literal. I am super excited to release on product hunt today! 🚀 Why did we create Literal? 🇩🇪 Efficiency matters We were annoyed that no tool existed to keep all those involved in the app development cycle (devs, PMs, marketing, designers, QA, etc.) on the same page. The days leading up to each release were tense; information got lost, decisions were made hastily without proper context and questions took way too long to answer 🤦‍♂️. So… 💡 Literal We created that same page - a single source of truth for everyone on the app team. Literal creates an app map from a simple video recording, automatically grouping relevant screens into user flows. 🤔 App Map? See several maps of popular apps on our examples page. Try uploading your own or use our sample of the ProductHunt iOS app! 👩‍💻 More Insights If you want to see API calls and analytics events, visit our SDK docs. Once you have a map created, add a service account for your analytics provider to see live data for each screen. 🛳️ Ship with Confidence Take a look at our video to see how we can use Literal to diagnose a problem with ProductHunt’s onboarding flow. 🤭 Hint: duplicate usernames can cause cryptic errors…🪦 🥳 Collaborate Share Literal with your team and start collaborating today!
Jacinta
@vicidroid I had the exact same issue trying to sign up! Didn't know it was because of my username. Really neat.
Raph
@timjj22 thank you for the support 😃
Raph
@nathanyim Thanks for the support! We love helping out product teams ship better quality products!
Chris Scoville
We've been using Literal for projects at Calm, and have found it really helpful for things like doing new feature reviews before a mobile app release. This helps ensure what has been implemented matches designs and that we're also sending analytics events on the correct screens. We have also found it helpful to review user flows for different screen sizes, different platforms (iOS and Android), and languages all within one board within Literal. It's a big time saver compared to piecing together the screenshots one by one in some other tool. I definitely encourage others to try it out! We've found it has been super helpful.
Chi-Kai Chien
@chris_scoville So appreciative of your team's great feedback along the way. You've been instrumental in helping shape Literal!
Raph
@chris_scoville It's been great working with the folks at Calm. Kudos to the app team at Calm; their app screens look great on our literal boards.
Alex Bird
@chris_scoville Thanks for all your support and feedback this year! It has been so helpful, and we're all grateful for it.
Joshua Herzig-Marx
I had the chance to play around with early versions of this service and...whoa. It's like it does three magical things that formerly would have required hours (or more likely wouldn't get done): 1️⃣ Documenting the current state of the app UX. Not the designer's wishes, not what I happened to have screenshotted last week: the actual UX as it exists today. Take a minute and ask your customer service team if they'd like this. Seriously: go on; I'll wait. 2️⃣ Funnel analysis. Sure, you probably have detailed and well-documented funnels set up inside of Amplitude, right? Right? Well, these funnels are so easy to read even your CEO can read them. Which might be a mixed blessing. 3️⃣ Diagnose problems. Conversion is dropping; why? Maybe it was that change you made, maybe it was the update to iOS 17, or maybe your senior architect just refactored event names and forgot to tell anyone. Don't pull out your hair or stress your engineers--figure it out for yourself in minutes. Literal is so cool.
Chi-Kai Chien
@joshua_herzig_marx Thanks for your kind words. Appreciate your insightful feedback from the early days!
Alex Bird
@joshua_herzig_marx Thanks for the support!
SiNing Chan
There's a real need for a product like this. Most impressed with how it translates mobile screen recordings auto-magically into an app flow/map. Congrats on the launch and can't wait to see what you all come up with next!
Ryan Nhieu
@syoung thank you for the support!
Raph
@syoung We love how anyone can upload an app recording and get a ux map in minutes. It's immensely useful for competitor analysis when starting a brand new feature. No more manual screenshots!
Spencer Kerber
Chi-Kai walked me through Literal earlier this year and WOW do they move fast. The product hunt launch looks amazing. Literal is totally a more enjoyable experience than the alternatives. Accessible and modern in approach to how people want to build and use their analytics tools.
Raph
@skerbz We loved making it easier to access product analytics with the connection to screens. No more manual figma mocks with outdated funnel numbers. Thanks for the feedback along the way.
Chi-Kai Chien
@skerbz Thanks for your support!
James Joaquin
I've known this rockstar team since they were building mobile apps at CareZone. Literal was born from a real customer need, and the way this product visualizes your analytics and funnels is just magic. Try it now!
Chi-Kai Chien
@jamesjoaquin Thanks for believing in us from Day 1, and contributing so many great ideas!
Alex Bird
@jamesjoaquin My sincerest thanks for all your support, James!
Phillip Smith
@jamesjoaquin Thank you for the enthusiastic and steadfast support, James!
Prateek Gupta
I immediately got the value prop of analytics being presented in a flow-like fashion - across app screens. It makes analytics usable. Congrats Chi-Kai on your launch!
Chi-Kai Chien
@prateek_gupta8 Thank you for your support!
Ryan Nhieu
@prateek_gupta8 yes! Let’s make analytics less scary! Thanks for the support!
Tyson Mao
Analytics have been more important as ever as user acquisition keeps getting harder and harder. I'm really impressed with how easy this product makes it to get analytics on my mobile app. Also, being able to break down screens from what is actually in production will really keeps the team in actual sync and avoid errors due to lag in communication. I'm looking forward to implementing this with my team!
Chi-Kai Chien
@tysonmao thanks for your support! Happy to help get you up and going. Our developer docs are at docs.literal.ai.
Raph
@tysonmao Check out our docs for iOS and Android. Thanks for the support!
Lenny Rachitsky
Congrats on the launch Chi-Kai!
Raph
@lenny_rachitsky Thanks for the support - btw we love the meetups and podcast!
Chi-Kai Chien
@lenny_rachitsky thanks, appreciate your support!
Raghavan Menon
Congrats on launching! Such a clever idea. I've just begun trying it out at Espresa and so useful to understand our analytics events. Excited to try out everything it can do. Definitely worth checking out!
Chi-Kai Chien
@raghavan8 Thanks! Looking forward to getting you and the team up and going.
Shreyas Chand
I've done too many calls where the team is sharing multiple tabs of analytics, figma specs, and other dashboards to piece together the user story that our numbers are telling us. This tool will make that process much more collaborative! Also...omgwtf... creating a visual map from screen recordings is straight magic!!
Chi-Kai Chien
@chandsie The life of a mobile dev. :-) Thanks for the support! We've been heads down building exactly what would've been useful to us in the past. Shipping weekly iOS and Android releases is hard work!
Phillip Smith
@chandsie Thank you for appreciating our work. Hope the tool delivers for you! We welcome feedback and suggestions.
Ryan McDonough
Being able to see all the analytics/API calls inline with live product flows is a game changer. No more photo albums filled with unreviewed screenshots, living with the vague hope we caught issues in QA for the build, or wondering if we accidentally orphaned any user flows. Great work!
Chi-Kai Chien
@ryantmcdonough Thanks! Really appreciate your support!
Raph
@ryantmcdonough Glad the integration went well! We love chatting with you and the devs.
Aman Manik
When I was at Alan, I used to do screen audits to get the whole team on the same page and manually load up analytics. Sad and happy to have discovered Literal via @chikai many months later. For anyone that wants to get deep into understanding your experiences, both qualitatively and quantitatively, Literal is literally amazing.
Chi-Kai Chien
@amanik Appreciate the support and validation!
Raph
@amanik Thanks for spreading the word!
Jacinta
Wow! It really does only takes a few seconds of seeing it in action to understand the positive impact this could have on app development process. Not only is it super useful to have all the screens laid out in logical user flow, but having them paired with the API calls removes a layer of obfuscation that is normally a pain to deal with. Congrats on the launch! Am excited what other features you bring in the future. Hope your hard work pays off and you see lots of success!
Chi-Kai Chien
@jferrant thank you! Lots of useful features coming out soon around analytics. Did you try the tracking plan view at the top of the metadata panel?
Jacinta
@chikai I didn't notice that yet. I tried it out on the "Calm" app example! That's so much easier than tracking in spreadsheets. Loved that it shows the analytics event with the screen.
Chi-Kai Chien
@jferrant Events and properties usually end up getting named poorly and inconsistently—a picture is worth a thousands words! An automatic picture is worth...? 😁
Whitman Kwok
Congrats - as an early user during our app development and a big fan, great to see you here. Several have mentioned how this would help with big teams with lots of screens and user flows which is definitely true. As a startup it just makes life better since we don’t have the resources and are constantly iterating. Here’s hoping that others will get to benefit from Literal.
Raph
@kavsports Thank you so much for the feedback in the early days! It was great working with kavsports on iOS.
Chi-Kai Chien
@kavsports Happy to indirectly help make sure your customers get great fitting bike helmets!
Whitman Kwok
@vicidroid - you all did a great job accommodating our screen/step with dynamic content where the user was taking a head scan. Very cool.
megsloan
Congrats to the team! Used an early version of this product and it helped us move fast and get a real view of our product experience from the customer POV. It was a real myth buster internally and helped us up our game!
Chi-Kai Chien
@megsloan Super glad we could help out your team. Appreciate all the great feedback you've given us along the way!
Youcef Es-skouri
Congratulations on the launch. Super excited about Literal!
Sandro Turriate
@youcefhq Thanks for all your support and advice!
Chi-Kai Chien
@youcefhq Super appreciative of your advice!
Sumanyu Sharma
Congrats on the launch guys! We've run into this pain point (misaligned design/data assets + manually copy-pasting funnel designs with #s below in decks) at Citizen so many times. This solves a real pain point for us.
Raph
@sumanyu_sharma Thanks for your support Sumanyu!
Chi-Kai Chien
@sumanyu_sharma Thanks for the feedback!