Grinding Gears

Reporting Data at FreeAgent We keep track of a range of customer behaviours in the FreeAgent application as a means to understand engagement and to formulate and measure our OKRs. Examples of this include support requests raised through our ticketing system, Zendesk, the scores and comments provided by our users during NPS surveys and event data detailing specific actions taken within the application. As a concrete example of the latter,… Continue reading

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on building a machine learning model that can estimate the probability that a customer will convert from the free trial to a paid subscriber. In practice, I combine the predictions from this model for cohorts of companies, which are defined by their acquisition channel and acquisition month, and so a method is required for calculating the conversion rate uncertainties for each cohort.… Continue reading

The application process After having the fantastic and inevitable university-student-in-their-penultimate-year realisation that I’m almost one year away from graduation and do not feel adequately prepared, I decided that an internship could be a great way to up my experience and knowledge before my final year. Data science, specifically, is what I was looking for as I’m interested in machine learning and artificial intelligence, and I thought a data science internship… Continue reading

At FreeAgent we’re building a new platform to allow our teams to explore their data and glean new insights from it. The platform is built using Looker on top of Amazon Redshift, and so far it’s been enthusiastically received by the teams that use it. However, the process of building up the platform and driving adoption hasn’t been entirely straightforward. There has been a recurring issue that we’ve have had… Continue reading

I’ve been learning to love the ActiveRecord query interface over the past few months. Whilst I find it infuriating when I’m battling it to do what I actually want, I also relish the power and convenience it gives me for many simple queries. So, when it came to designing a query language for historical data in our systems, ActiveRecord was a natural choice. We can now do queries like: FA::Subscriptions.… Continue reading