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Show HN: Volument – Our take on website analytics

67 points by fuzzymind 5y ago

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
strzibny 5y ago
> Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Plausible offer bare-bones pageview- and session statistics. Like Volument, they all focus on privacy so you don't need any cookie banners outside Europe. I am not sure I follow. Why do you still need one in Europe? And besides I think you don't need one with your competitors [0] [0] https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-google-analytics/ https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-g...
- tipiirai 5y ago
  It's the local European laws. For example in Finland, where I live all analytics software must display a consent because the data is used for non-essential purposes. Applies to Volument and our competitors. More details on this doc, which is co-authored with a GDPR official: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy
  - jakelazaroff 5y ago
    GDPR differentiates between cookies and localStorage? I'm skeptical, but if so that's… a really surprising loophole.
    - tipiirai 5y ago
      It doesn't differentiate. GDPR is about identities and using them for non-essential purposes. It doesn't take a stance on the technologies in use. According to our lawyer GDPR law texts doesn't contain the word "cookie" anywhere. Storing a user identifying random id to any permanent storage (cookie, localStorage, etag, Flash, you name it...) goes against GDPR.
      - jakelazaroff 5y ago
        Got it — the difference between Volument’s localStorage and GA’s cookie is the “identifying” aspect of the latter.
        tipiirai 5y ago
        Exactly. GA uses identifying cookie so a consent is needed outside Europe too as per CCPA and others. Moreover you must explicitly ask for permission to identify the visitor and explain why you do it.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
tipiirai 5y ago
Founder here (1). Here's a backstory: We launched the MVP two years ago with this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116 Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load yet. Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is now useful — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include: 1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they convert. You can start optimizing the causes. 2. Faster A/B testing: Volument is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional A/B testing tools. 3. Privacy-friendly. Volument is on the same line with Fathom, Plausible, or Simple Analytics when it comes to privacy. We've built a custom stack from scratch so this is not just another pretty face to Google Analytics data. We have full control and the door is open for pretty much anything. The parent post links to a founding story and here's a direct link to the front page: https://volument.com https://volument.com --- 1: Bit of myself: I'm a long-term frontend developer: the original author of semi-popular projects like jQuery Tools (2011), Head JS (2013), and Riot JS (2014). I'm also a co-founder of two other successful startups: Flowplayer (flowplayer.com) and Muut (muut.com).
- thehappypm 5y ago
  Hey! Cool product! I have run many A/B tests in my career, and agree that it really does take ages to get statistically relevant results, and most results don't really pan out at scale. (Though in my experience, a new button color might drive conversion just by catching the user's eye as something new, but this doesn't stick around). How do you get A/B test results faster? New math? Or just more BS? ;)
  - tipiirai 5y ago
    The secret is on Volument's ability to measure a bunch of "leading indicators", like the ratio of first-time visitors who stayed on the website more than 7 seconds (which indicates a better first impression). For every key conversion event at the bottom of the funnel (such as "signed up"), there are thousands of leading indicators to take insights from. By utilizing these top-of-the-funnel metrics you'll know whether the new version better in a matter of days — even hours on a very busy site. Another fact is that Volument is a full-blown analytics software it already knows all the data for the baseline variant "A", so you only need to collect data for the "B" variant after a specific timestamp. Further cutting the measurement time by 50%. More about the topic here: https://volument.com/learn/ https://volument.com/learn/
krmmalik 5y ago
Ok, you have me convinced. I'm actually going to try this. I have two separate sites I want to try it on. Is it 10k free events per site or per user account. Also, is it "catch-all" event tracking or do I have to set the event tracking up manually? Apologies if that's already mentioned on your site but I did go through the article and didn't see any mention of it.
- fuzzymind 5y ago
  You must setup conversions manually. Here are the instructions: https://volument.com/learn/setting-up#conversions https://volument.com/learn/setting-up#conversions
  - krmmalik 5y ago
    alrighty, I installed it. Let's see how this goes.
andrenotgiant 5y ago
A year ago, I found Volument's mini-manifesto "Minimalism: an undervalued development skill"[1] on HN (discussion [2]) and it resonated hard with me. I worked in Marketing and community at DigitalOcean over five years as it scaled. I had contributed to a hodge-podge of overlapping analytics tools running in managed chaos at my company, I had watched another team get hoodwinked into a multi-year deal with a big analytics/testing tool that had been in development for months without yielding a single test, I had seen people throughout the company struggle to find answers to basic analytics questions due to the complexity of the tool stack. I got a Volument pilot going on the public part of our site, and while the scale really strained the Volument infrastructure, I absolutely loved the opinionated and simple interface. It was like what Netlify did for static-site hosting, applied to analytics. Volument took the 3000 views and features of a legacy provider like GA and just figured out what people actually need and boiled it down to 5. I've changed companies since, but am excited to test this new version at my current company. The people at Volument are super-great and responsive, and if the new one is anything like the original it's going to be very useful. [1] https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-development-skill https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-de... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871491
- tipiirai 5y ago
  Thank you, Andy! Really appreciate this comment.
RileyJames 5y ago
Very interesting. I’ve recently switched a bunch of sites from GA to plausible, and love it! I only used the few features / tools plausible offers, the rest of GA was privacy invading bloat. But I foresee I will need the kinds of features volument provides in the near future (only some of the conversion focused websites / pages). Might throw it up on one site today to test it out.
Dyac 5y ago
So, I am exactly your target market. I run optimisation at a mid-size global company with a few websites (ranging from 100k to 100m sessions per year). I do A/B testing day in day out. While it has its issues, I think completely dismissing it the way you do on the site makes me question everything else the site claims. I looked at the live demo and it says about "significance", so I guess you're using a frequentist approach. The sample sizes are to small though, and I think you have SRMs, and it seems like the start and end times for the variants don't match. Also, in ecom it's bad practice to run any test or do much analysis on incomplete periods (eg a pay cycle). Why aren't you using bayesian stats? How can I compare test variants? We use monetate or SFCC a/b testing. Can it hook off events like GA can?
- fuzzymind 5y ago
  The major difference between traditional A/B testing and Volument is that the comparisons are based on _cohort analysis_. It takes two groups of visitors and places them side-by-side starting from the very first visit: how they gradually build awareness and interest (metrics from the first visit) before taking action (on the first visit or on later visits). Then you take a cutoff day (say Day 7) and compare what has happened (how much retention, conversions, sales, virality) before that day. The whole "traction" so to speak.
huttie 5y ago
This has been bothering me a lot. I'm a founder of a start-up that's just launched and currently in the 'throwing spaghetti against the wall' phase of acquiring users. The Mixpanel/GA setup I've got is good at product analytics, but tracking exactly where they come from would be an enormous help. Anyway, signed up (which was super easy btw) and here's hoping for some good conversion analytics.
foreigner 5y ago
Is there no API? The only way to consume the results is the website?
- fuzzymind 5y ago
  Currently yes. Webhooks and S3-compliant data export is on our roadmap: https://volument.com/roadmap/ https://volument.com/roadmap/
newusertoday 5y ago
UI is awesome, i can't figure out what framework you are using or you are doing everything by yourself?
- tipiirai 5y ago
  Thanks! Glad you like it. I'm the original author of Riot (https://riot.js.org/ https://riot.js.org/) so that's the style of frontend development I'm most comfortable with. We're using our own flavour of the library, which has the original super-mimimalistic feel on it.
golondon 5y ago
Hi, what's the infra behind this? What do you use to store events or only the count of them to generate the numbers? Other question I have is, you seem to have returning visitors feature and as far as I understood, you store info in localStorage to be able to do that. I guess you're generating a uniq identifier to be able to that and store in the localStorage. Although it's not a cookie, semantically isn't kinda same thing? If you were to store those in cookies you would have needed to show cookie banner, but since it's in localStorage you don't have to?
- tipiirai 5y ago
  We're using Nats (https://nats.io/ https://nats.io/) for event streaming and pub/sub. The sessions are aggregated in memory, then they go to Badger (https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger), and finally the daily aggregates are easily distributable and immutable JSON files. We're setting a session identifier to sessionStorage and those id's are wiped out once the session is processed and leaves the server memory. We worked together with a privacy specialist to ensure this is not violating GDPR. Details on what/how we collect data is here: https://volument.com/privacy/ https://volument.com/privacy/
  - golondon 5y ago
    Thanks!

67 points by fuzzymind 5y ago

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

> Fathom, Simple Analytics, and Plausible offer bare-bones pageview- and session statistics. Like Volument, they all focus on privacy so you don't need any cookie banners outside Europe. I am not sure I follow. Why do you still need one in Europe? And besides I think you don't need one with your competitors [0] [0] https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-google-analytics/ https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-g...

tipiirai 5y ago
It's the local European laws. For example in Finland, where I live all analytics software must display a consent because the data is used for non-essential purposes. Applies to Volument and our competitors. More details on this doc, which is co-authored with a GDPR official: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy
- jakelazaroff 5y ago
  GDPR differentiates between cookies and localStorage? I'm skeptical, but if so that's… a really surprising loophole.
  - tipiirai 5y ago
    It doesn't differentiate. GDPR is about identities and using them for non-essential purposes. It doesn't take a stance on the technologies in use. According to our lawyer GDPR law texts doesn't contain the word "cookie" anywhere. Storing a user identifying random id to any permanent storage (cookie, localStorage, etag, Flash, you name it...) goes against GDPR.
    - jakelazaroff 5y ago
      Got it — the difference between Volument’s localStorage and GA’s cookie is the “identifying” aspect of the latter.
      - tipiirai 5y ago
        Exactly. GA uses identifying cookie so a consent is needed outside Europe too as per CCPA and others. Moreover you must explicitly ask for permission to identify the visitor and explain why you do it.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

tipiirai 5y ago

Founder here (1). Here's a backstory: We launched the MVP two years ago with this HN post: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116 Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load yet. Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is now useful — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include: 1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they convert. You can start optimizing the causes. 2. Faster A/B testing: Volument is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional A/B testing tools. 3. Privacy-friendly. Volument is on the same line with Fathom, Plausible, or Simple Analytics when it comes to privacy. We've built a custom stack from scratch so this is not just another pretty face to Google Analytics data. We have full control and the door is open for pretty much anything. The parent post links to a founding story and here's a direct link to the front page: https://volument.com https://volument.com --- 1: Bit of myself: I'm a long-term frontend developer: the original author of semi-popular projects like jQuery Tools (2011), Head JS (2013), and Riot JS (2014). I'm also a co-founder of two other successful startups: Flowplayer (flowplayer.com) and Muut (muut.com).

thehappypm 5y ago
Hey! Cool product! I have run many A/B tests in my career, and agree that it really does take ages to get statistically relevant results, and most results don't really pan out at scale. (Though in my experience, a new button color might drive conversion just by catching the user's eye as something new, but this doesn't stick around). How do you get A/B test results faster? New math? Or just more BS? ;)
- tipiirai 5y ago
  The secret is on Volument's ability to measure a bunch of "leading indicators", like the ratio of first-time visitors who stayed on the website more than 7 seconds (which indicates a better first impression). For every key conversion event at the bottom of the funnel (such as "signed up"), there are thousands of leading indicators to take insights from. By utilizing these top-of-the-funnel metrics you'll know whether the new version better in a matter of days — even hours on a very busy site. Another fact is that Volument is a full-blown analytics software it already knows all the data for the baseline variant "A", so you only need to collect data for the "B" variant after a specific timestamp. Further cutting the measurement time by 50%. More about the topic here: https://volument.com/learn/ https://volument.com/learn/

krmmalik 5y ago

Ok, you have me convinced. I'm actually going to try this. I have two separate sites I want to try it on. Is it 10k free events per site or per user account. Also, is it "catch-all" event tracking or do I have to set the event tracking up manually? Apologies if that's already mentioned on your site but I did go through the article and didn't see any mention of it.

fuzzymind 5y ago
You must setup conversions manually. Here are the instructions: https://volument.com/learn/setting-up#conversions https://volument.com/learn/setting-up#conversions
- krmmalik 5y ago
  alrighty, I installed it. Let's see how this goes.

andrenotgiant 5y ago

A year ago, I found Volument's mini-manifesto "Minimalism: an undervalued development skill"[1] on HN (discussion [2]) and it resonated hard with me. I worked in Marketing and community at DigitalOcean over five years as it scaled. I had contributed to a hodge-podge of overlapping analytics tools running in managed chaos at my company, I had watched another team get hoodwinked into a multi-year deal with a big analytics/testing tool that had been in development for months without yielding a single test, I had seen people throughout the company struggle to find answers to basic analytics questions due to the complexity of the tool stack. I got a Volument pilot going on the public part of our site, and while the scale really strained the Volument infrastructure, I absolutely loved the opinionated and simple interface. It was like what Netlify did for static-site hosting, applied to analytics. Volument took the 3000 views and features of a legacy provider like GA and just figured out what people actually need and boiled it down to 5. I've changed companies since, but am excited to test this new version at my current company. The people at Volument are super-great and responsive, and if the new one is anything like the original it's going to be very useful. [1] https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-development-skill https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-de... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871491 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871491

tipiirai 5y ago
Thank you, Andy! Really appreciate this comment.

RileyJames 5y ago

Very interesting. I’ve recently switched a bunch of sites from GA to plausible, and love it! I only used the few features / tools plausible offers, the rest of GA was privacy invading bloat. But I foresee I will need the kinds of features volument provides in the near future (only some of the conversion focused websites / pages). Might throw it up on one site today to test it out.

Dyac 5y ago

So, I am exactly your target market. I run optimisation at a mid-size global company with a few websites (ranging from 100k to 100m sessions per year). I do A/B testing day in day out. While it has its issues, I think completely dismissing it the way you do on the site makes me question everything else the site claims. I looked at the live demo and it says about "significance", so I guess you're using a frequentist approach. The sample sizes are to small though, and I think you have SRMs, and it seems like the start and end times for the variants don't match. Also, in ecom it's bad practice to run any test or do much analysis on incomplete periods (eg a pay cycle). Why aren't you using bayesian stats? How can I compare test variants? We use monetate or SFCC a/b testing. Can it hook off events like GA can?

fuzzymind 5y ago
The major difference between traditional A/B testing and Volument is that the comparisons are based on _cohort analysis_. It takes two groups of visitors and places them side-by-side starting from the very first visit: how they gradually build awareness and interest (metrics from the first visit) before taking action (on the first visit or on later visits). Then you take a cutoff day (say Day 7) and compare what has happened (how much retention, conversions, sales, virality) before that day. The whole "traction" so to speak.

huttie 5y ago

This has been bothering me a lot. I'm a founder of a start-up that's just launched and currently in the 'throwing spaghetti against the wall' phase of acquiring users. The Mixpanel/GA setup I've got is good at product analytics, but tracking exactly where they come from would be an enormous help. Anyway, signed up (which was super easy btw) and here's hoping for some good conversion analytics.

foreigner 5y ago

Is there no API? The only way to consume the results is the website?

fuzzymind 5y ago
Currently yes. Webhooks and S3-compliant data export is on our roadmap: https://volument.com/roadmap/ https://volument.com/roadmap/

newusertoday 5y ago

UI is awesome, i can't figure out what framework you are using or you are doing everything by yourself?

tipiirai 5y ago
Thanks! Glad you like it. I'm the original author of Riot (https://riot.js.org/ https://riot.js.org/) so that's the style of frontend development I'm most comfortable with. We're using our own flavour of the library, which has the original super-mimimalistic feel on it.

golondon 5y ago

Hi, what's the infra behind this? What do you use to store events or only the count of them to generate the numbers? Other question I have is, you seem to have returning visitors feature and as far as I understood, you store info in localStorage to be able to do that. I guess you're generating a uniq identifier to be able to that and store in the localStorage. Although it's not a cookie, semantically isn't kinda same thing? If you were to store those in cookies you would have needed to show cookie banner, but since it's in localStorage you don't have to?

tipiirai 5y ago
We're using Nats (https://nats.io/ https://nats.io/) for event streaming and pub/sub. The sessions are aggregated in memory, then they go to Badger (https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger https://github.com/dgraph-io/badger), and finally the daily aggregates are easily distributable and immutable JSON files. We're setting a session identifier to sessionStorage and those id's are wiped out once the session is processed and leaves the server memory. We worked together with a privacy specialist to ensure this is not violating GDPR. Details on what/how we collect data is here: https://volument.com/privacy/ https://volument.com/privacy/
- golondon 5y ago
  Thanks!