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Mixpanel Raises $10.25M

111 points by mynameisraj 14y ago

jph 14y ago
Congrats! I love Mixpanel for the results, and also the team is great. I switched from Kissmetrics to Mixpanel and found the Mixpanel team to be solid, smart, and very responsive.
kriro 14y ago
Doshi said he wanted to let it be known that he’ll use the funding to pay his first 100 employees “way above market” Nice :) Seems like a good company with a valuable product.
- throwaway15289 14y ago
  100 employees @ 100k = 10 mil. He will last a year?
  - bignoggins 14y ago
    I'm assuming his company actually makes revenues since they charge, so most of the salaries may be covered by revenues already and the funding will make up the rest.
Mizza 14y ago
Been thinking about switching to Mixpanel, but can't see any massive improvements over the new Google Analytics, and it looks a lot more tedious to set up. Any opinions here?
- giltotherescue 14y ago
  It's exactly the same amount of effort to setup. I use both GA (for pageview tracking) and Mixpanel (for engagement tracking). Mixpanel's funnel tracker is more robust, and there is no GA equivalent to Mixpanel's retention analysis. Plus, Mixpanel's event tracking is truly real time.
- rogerbinns 14y ago
  I've been using both. The primary use case has been from a mobile app where various events are tracked. There are also some extra pieces of data attached to each event (for example the audio volume) called custom variables in Google and properties in Mixpanel. Google works really well with its out of the box reports. The UI once you are trying to do more complex things gets somewhat bizarre, but you can generally find out whatever you wanted. If you have a numeric custom variable then they only show the average which is spectacularly useless - the distribution is far more important. Their Android library only allows one tracker instance so you can't have two different components tracking events against different ids. There is no support, unless you fork out $150k per year (that is the lowest price above the free plan). There is a way of doing data queries but I don't believe you can get export the raw underlying data that was sent to them. Mixpanel is very strange. My (perhaps wrong) conclusion is that it was designed by an architecture astronaut. I mean data is just data so why not abstract data into data. There are no precanned reports, and the reporting tool requires conditions to be set when there is more than one item of data being looked at (which is all the time because you are trying to correlate and rank items with each other). It is frustrating to try and find out anything. You do get to see more granularity on numeric values, but not as much as I'd like. They do have support but all we got back was a bunch of platitudes. Fortunately they do have an export mechanism so you can at least download all of your raw data and write your own analysis code.
nirvana 14y ago
I really shouldn't be building this myself. But looking at these prices for mixpanel and kissmetrics, they seem out of whack-- great for profitable businesses and enterprise, but way out of line for startups. Plus what if you need between 25,000 and 500,000 data points per month with mixpanel? That's a huge gulf and you go from free to $150 a month? Some startups start with large customer bases but operate at a relatively low margin per customer (because its extremely cheap to serve each customer.) For instance, for $250 a month in hosting[1], I can service tens of millions of customers, but buying either of these services for that many customers would cost a lot more than the hosting. Looking at real world metrics for one of my apps I'm currently collecting enough data points (for free using Flurry) that to use mix panel would cost a sizable (%15-%20) of the apps monthly revenue. I'm not saying they're not worth it-- I'm sure they are. I just don't see a way for a startup to onramp here. Our primary burn is keeping us housed and fed, operations are being kept as cheap as possible until we have real revenue. $150 is a lot. (though kiss metrics has a $30 and $80 plans which alone means we're more likely to use them.) [1] in part because hetzner's XE 4S servers are such a screaming deal- that's about 5 32GB servers.
- suhail 14y ago
  We absolutely support you: https://mixpanel.com/free/ https://mixpanel.com/free/ - instead of a $30-80/mo plan, it's free! Of course, if you're averse to placing a badge on your site, then that's a different problem.
  - ckluis 14y ago
    The badge option is very generous IMO. Keep up the awesome work!
  - giltotherescue 14y ago
    I'm glad that you offer the badge option, but I wish that was in addition to a $30-80/mo plan that I could pay for with cash...
  - Danieru 14y ago
    Shouldn't that be no-followed?
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
nivertech 14y ago
octave:1> price_per_datapoint = 150 / 500000 price_per_datapoint = 3.0000e-04 octave:2> datapoints_per_months = 7e9 datapoints_per_months = 7.0000e+09 octave:3> revenue_per_month = datapoints_per_months * price_per_datapoint revenue_per_month = 2100000 I guess they have discounted volume plans, otherwise it's looking too good to be true ;) UPDATE: using their 20M datapoints for $1600 plan, 7B datapoints per month would bring "only" $560K revenue per month.
Skywing 14y ago
I've known Suhail, online, for quite awhile. Good to see this news. Congrats. I remember when he wanted to learn Django, now look where he's at. :P

111 points by mynameisraj 14y ago

jph 14y ago

Congrats! I love Mixpanel for the results, and also the team is great. I switched from Kissmetrics to Mixpanel and found the Mixpanel team to be solid, smart, and very responsive.

kriro 14y ago

Doshi said he wanted to let it be known that he’ll use the funding to pay his first 100 employees “way above market” Nice :) Seems like a good company with a valuable product.

throwaway15289 14y ago
100 employees @ 100k = 10 mil. He will last a year?
- bignoggins 14y ago
  I'm assuming his company actually makes revenues since they charge, so most of the salaries may be covered by revenues already and the funding will make up the rest.

Mizza 14y ago

Been thinking about switching to Mixpanel, but can't see any massive improvements over the new Google Analytics, and it looks a lot more tedious to set up. Any opinions here?

giltotherescue 14y ago
It's exactly the same amount of effort to setup. I use both GA (for pageview tracking) and Mixpanel (for engagement tracking). Mixpanel's funnel tracker is more robust, and there is no GA equivalent to Mixpanel's retention analysis. Plus, Mixpanel's event tracking is truly real time.
rogerbinns 14y ago
I've been using both. The primary use case has been from a mobile app where various events are tracked. There are also some extra pieces of data attached to each event (for example the audio volume) called custom variables in Google and properties in Mixpanel. Google works really well with its out of the box reports. The UI once you are trying to do more complex things gets somewhat bizarre, but you can generally find out whatever you wanted. If you have a numeric custom variable then they only show the average which is spectacularly useless - the distribution is far more important. Their Android library only allows one tracker instance so you can't have two different components tracking events against different ids. There is no support, unless you fork out $150k per year (that is the lowest price above the free plan). There is a way of doing data queries but I don't believe you can get export the raw underlying data that was sent to them. Mixpanel is very strange. My (perhaps wrong) conclusion is that it was designed by an architecture astronaut. I mean data is just data so why not abstract data into data. There are no precanned reports, and the reporting tool requires conditions to be set when there is more than one item of data being looked at (which is all the time because you are trying to correlate and rank items with each other). It is frustrating to try and find out anything. You do get to see more granularity on numeric values, but not as much as I'd like. They do have support but all we got back was a bunch of platitudes. Fortunately they do have an export mechanism so you can at least download all of your raw data and write your own analysis code.

nirvana 14y ago

I really shouldn't be building this myself. But looking at these prices for mixpanel and kissmetrics, they seem out of whack-- great for profitable businesses and enterprise, but way out of line for startups. Plus what if you need between 25,000 and 500,000 data points per month with mixpanel? That's a huge gulf and you go from free to $150 a month? Some startups start with large customer bases but operate at a relatively low margin per customer (because its extremely cheap to serve each customer.) For instance, for $250 a month in hosting[1], I can service tens of millions of customers, but buying either of these services for that many customers would cost a lot more than the hosting. Looking at real world metrics for one of my apps I'm currently collecting enough data points (for free using Flurry) that to use mix panel would cost a sizable (%15-%20) of the apps monthly revenue. I'm not saying they're not worth it-- I'm sure they are. I just don't see a way for a startup to onramp here. Our primary burn is keeping us housed and fed, operations are being kept as cheap as possible until we have real revenue. $150 is a lot. (though kiss metrics has a $30 and $80 plans which alone means we're more likely to use them.) [1] in part because hetzner's XE 4S servers are such a screaming deal- that's about 5 32GB servers.

suhail 14y ago
We absolutely support you: https://mixpanel.com/free/ https://mixpanel.com/free/ - instead of a $30-80/mo plan, it's free! Of course, if you're averse to placing a badge on your site, then that's a different problem.
- ckluis 14y ago
  The badge option is very generous IMO. Keep up the awesome work!
- giltotherescue 14y ago
  I'm glad that you offer the badge option, but I wish that was in addition to a $30-80/mo plan that I could pay for with cash...
- Danieru 14y ago
  Shouldn't that be no-followed?

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

nivertech 14y ago

octave:1> price_per_datapoint = 150 / 500000 price_per_datapoint = 3.0000e-04 octave:2> datapoints_per_months = 7e9 datapoints_per_months = 7.0000e+09 octave:3> revenue_per_month = datapoints_per_months * price_per_datapoint revenue_per_month = 2100000 I guess they have discounted volume plans, otherwise it's looking too good to be true ;) UPDATE: using their 20M datapoints for $1600 plan, 7B datapoints per month would bring "only" $560K revenue per month.

Skywing 14y ago

I've known Suhail, online, for quite awhile. Good to see this news. Congrats. I remember when he wanted to learn Django, now look where he's at. :P