[HN Gopher] A guide to product analytics tools for startups
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A guide to product analytics tools for startups
Author : Fission
Score : 99 points
Date : 2020-12-10 16:06 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (satchel.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (satchel.com)
| areichert wrote:
| I know PostHog is only lightly mentioned in the article, but I
| would highly recommend checking them out! [0] (They're also open-
| source and provide a self-hosted solution. [1])
|
| [0] https://posthog.com/
|
| [1] https://github.com/posthog/posthog
| jayparth wrote:
| Yeah they do Fullstory-type stuff, Heap-type stuff, plus they
| have an SDK in most popular languages (which no other company
| has.) If I didn't already set my stuff up before I had heard of
| them, I would have gone with them. They have the best parts of
| other tools.
|
| Unless their stuff doesn't work well. I only spent a couple of
| hours so I might not have noticed UX issues that would have
| been painful to deal with.
| pepelondono wrote:
| So all the products recommended by Satchel ar YC products, huh
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Is this dated? GA4 has switched to entirely event-driven
| framework for measurement.
| simpleoxygen wrote:
| Contrary to the main theme of the article, Google Analytics does
| in fact offer event based analytics in addition to page view
| analytics.
| subpixel wrote:
| When using event based goals, Google Analytics removes the
| ability to visualize funnels.
|
| In my day-to-day this is a big drawback.
| grumblestumble wrote:
| I was also befuddled by this. I was using event tracking with
| GA at least 3 years ago I think, so it was difficult for me to
| take this article seriously as it hammers on this point
| repeatedly
| sumoboy wrote:
| Google analytics v4 taking it another level also.
| catchmeifyoucan wrote:
| We use event-based analytics. A super easy way to do it is to
| create an AWS Lambda function that you can hit using a Rest API.
| A simple `console-log` statement with JSON.stringify will log it
| to Cloudwatch logs. And bam, you can create basic charts and
| stuff with [Log Insights](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloud
| Watch/latest/logs/CWL...). Up to 5Gb in the free tier. Easy
| dashboards. All data is in AWS (so less tools to keep up with)
|
| Tradeoff - their query language is poor, and I really want to do
| cohort analysis. But you can export as CSV, or easily push to
| Datadog.
| thingsilearned wrote:
| Great writeup here but I have a question on whether Product
| Analytics is at all appropriate for Startups. I'm incredibly
| biased (this problem is why I built Chartio), but I think these
| tools end up being quite bulky, expensive and a non-agile way to
| do analytics on your product. I feel these products are best
| suited for later stage companies trying with great tracking
| detail to improve a funnel or engagement metric, not simply
| monitor usage.
|
| The majority of the important things for a startup are usually
| already being tracked with timestamps in the database (new
| signups, new users, churned users, new todo items, etc). If a key
| metric is not directly tracked, there's usually a good enough
| proxy available somewhere in the database. A Busineess
| Intelligence product, or a SQL to chart tool is much more
| applicable and affordable in the startup stage.
|
| There are likely going to be responses here "But what about..."
| and I'll premptively respond to those with the question: Could
| that be answered/solved almost just as well with a query to the
| database, without sacrificing the agility, extra setup and data
| collection time, and expense overhead? Those are all very costly
| things for a startup.
| neilrahilly wrote:
| Disclosure: I work at Mixpanel
|
| We updated our packaging/pricing a few weeks ago. Our Free plan
| allows for 100k MTUs now (100x more volume), and our Growth plan
| is cheaper. https://mixpanel.com/pricing/
|
| We wanted to make a big improvement in both these categories for
| customers:
|
| - "How far you can get without paying"
|
| - "Paid Plan Affordability"
|
| Just an FYI since that change happened since this Satchel review
| was published in May.
| skohan wrote:
| Hey there!
|
| We're kicking the tires on Mixpanel - currently we're prepping
| for an alpha release, and there are a few things about the
| dashboards I wish either don't exist, or are not easy to find:
|
| 1. I wish I had more options for visualizations. Fot instance,
| at this scale, it would be really nice to have a scatter plot
| of events at exactly the time they occur, rather than by the
| hour
|
| 2. I really wish I could customize the graphs more - like if I
| have a 3 day view, I would rather group the events by the hour
| rather than the day, and it seems like I can't do that.
|
| 3. Is there a place to just query all the events, and get them
| in a table form? Like I would love to just be able to get _all_
| of a particular event in a certain time period, and then look
| through the properties and exact timings one by one.
|
| Anyway, just some casual observations from a potential user.
| spqr233 wrote:
| Wow that's a game changer
| polote wrote:
| If I can give an advice to the author. The structure of the
| article is not very good.
|
| There is no best product analytics tool, the 3 products presented
| are all great products. Instead of saying "this product is the
| best". You should do,
|
| - If you are in this case, use this product
|
| - In this case use this other one.
|
| - ...
|
| If you are just a startup wanting to go into product analytics,
| any of this product will be fine
| malisper wrote:
| (I used to work at Heap.)
|
| I think the post is spot on and it shows the Satchel team put did
| a ton of research into the post. There are two comments I would
| make on top of the post. First, know if the advice applies to
| you. If you are pre-product market fit it's probably too early to
| think about event based analytics. If you have a small number of
| users and are able to talk with all of them, you will get much
| more meaningful data getting to know them than if you were to set
| up product analytics. You probably don't have enough users to get
| meaningful data from product analytics anyways.
|
| Second, while the autotrack functionality at Heap is fantastic,
| what I saw was that a significant portion of Heap's customers
| were not able to use it. This primarily happened because in
| addition to using Heap's autotrack to collect data, a lot of
| Heap's customers were also using Segment to collect and route the
| data between different tools. This created two different sources
| of truth for the data and Segment usually wound up winning. For
| that reason, I left Heap ~18 months ago to start Freshpaint
| (freshpaint.io). Freshpaint is an autotrack based alternative to
| Segment, allowing you to autotrack data and feed that same
| dataset into all your different tools. That way you get all the
| advantages of autotrack without needing to maintain two sources
| of truth.
| bttrfl wrote:
| Another autotracking tool is https://useitbetter.com which
| combines quant analytics with heatmapping and a/b testing.
|
| I believe Mixpanel also offered autotracking for a while, but
| it didn't work out for some reason? It's probably difficult to
| mix pricing for manual tagging nad autotracking since the
| latter produce massive amounts of data.
| wdb wrote:
| The suggested website gives me a white page? Need to unblock
| my content blocker to get it loading. Not a great start imho
| bttrfl wrote:
| I use ublock, but the site works fine for me. Are you
| blocking JS? Looking at the source code it's some kind of a
| javascript single-pager, built entirely in the app itself.
| mmastrac wrote:
| Honestly this is a pretty weak overview of the landscape,
| apparently limited only to the top YC analytics companies and
| published by a YC company.
|
| There are tons of options out there, including many self-hosted
| solutions. You'll have to do further research beyond this
| article, however.
| jdgoesmarching wrote:
| I'm always suspicious of articles like these that keep bringing
| up one company that fits their criteria. That tells me the
| criteria was constructed around a specific offering, not the
| other way around.
| bijoo wrote:
| For example, Matomo... larger list here
| https://github.com/onurakpolat/awesome-analytics
| jayparth wrote:
| I mean... have you ever used Matomo? It isn't good. I checked
| it out earlier this year.
| bredren wrote:
| I've implemented both amplitude and mixpanel for event tracking
| on Django apps.
|
| I currently have a project that uses both auto JS and python-
| based track() calls using mixpanel.
|
| I've found people commonly block js analytics and it isn't safe
| to rely on for user behavior.
|
| For example, you can instrument react hooks, but you really aught
| to instrument the api calls they rely on or they will not get
| captured in many circumstances.
|
| I also have found mixpanel's anon / known user ID merge to be
| poorly documented and the community support to be kind of slow
| and did not get the sense the folks answering had not personally
| done the implementations being discussed.
|
| One of the biggest things I wanted out of event tracking was to
| build event bases web hooks to trigger drip-contact events.
|
| Mixpanel quietly deprecates web hooks a few months ago and now
| wants you to use partners that process your data and do this for
| you.
| verelo wrote:
| Out of curiosity, what category is your product in? I don't
| think i've found a huge amount of people block js analytics,
| but thats probably due to the categories of products I've
| worked in.
| bredren wrote:
| This new product is a consumer social / video concept.
|
| Doesn't just about every extension-based ad blocker block all
| js analytics discussed in this post?
|
| Have you done backup backend instrumentation if particular
| events to see definitively that you're getting duplicate
| events as often as you think?
|
| One thing I noticed is that without the belt and suspenders
| approach it really was not obvious what I was missing.
|
| I also care a lot about people who run ad blockers because I
| consider them to be more savvy and thus more likely to
| influence the behavior of others.
| [deleted]
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(page generated 2020-12-10 23:01 UTC)