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Ask HN: Is analytics a good space to enter as a small business these days?
I have an idea for an server side metrics aggregator , and client side analytics viewer. My idea, when fully executed would be to focus primarily on Funnel analytics, modeling user behaviors, and A/B testing. My target audience is Web Developers, and perhaps Mobile and Desktop developers as a secondary audience. Top competitors would be Mixpanel, Flurry, Heap, KISSmetrics, etc... These are all great companies enabling really fantastic things, but to date I've felt that they haven't enabled some of the most basic funnel analytics for developers, such as having a simple programmatic event tagging API that can also be used with arbitrary data, and pivoted upon after the fact for more comprehensive data-studying. I suppose I could get into more detail, but I'm wondering if folks have any high level thoughts on this marketplace/industry and what the common pitfalls are, or what aspects MUST be accounted for or known up front. Thanks for your insights...
- patio11 13y agoThis is a difficult space to enter as a sole proprietor: 1) You have to have an impressive level of ops skill, because your API failing at 4 AM in the morning for 5 minutes takes down customer sites and economic transactions, and you WILL get called on it. 2) Analytics is a hard sell to many companies. It requires non-trivial engineering work to integrate (you are, after all, proposing an API) and often doesn't obviously make them money. Talk to me or anybody who runs an analytics company privately if you want to hear some stories about where the typical well-run software company is in terms of using analytics. You may find that complex power-tools are not exactly what the market wants at the moment. 3) Are you good at B2B sales? This isn't a ginormous market at the moment, such that you can easily get to $10k a month in revenue by signing up 500 companies at $20 a month. That is why minimum buy-in at KissMetrics right now is $1.8k (and goes up quickly from there). Many companies in the space are similarly trying to move upmarket. In the direct B2B "dialing for dollars" that you'll be doing, prepare to answer questions such as "Why should I use you, who I've never heard of, when I could use the folks who invented the category for free or I can go with the thought leaders in the space and be sure not to get fired for losing all of our data?" 4) Analytics is a hard product to build, technically. There are substantial design and UX challenges. It is a space in which it is easy to ship something which hits every bullet on the design document and yet produces absolutely no value for customers. Don't get me wrong, people have succeeded with it. Paras Chopra came to me back in the day with an analytics startup that tried to be everything for everybody. It included an A/B testing module. I told him to scrap everything else and focus on that, partly because it was awesome and partially because A/B testing avoids some of the above problems (to a degree), and it's now an $X million a year business. I could't in good conscience recommend a broad-based analytics product as the first thing you try shipping as a solo founder / small business. (And I love the space.)
- spicybit 13y agoThank you Patrick, this is great feedback. I'm going to think on it a bit and see where I sit. Again, thanks!
- codeddesign 13y ago@patio11 has stated some real issues that you will run into when dealing with analytics. The space is highly competitive and you will need to be willing to throw a substantial amount of cash at building name recognition alone. Here at CodedDesign (codeddesign.org), we began building a quite complex intelligence analytics tool about a year ago and then decided to scrap it due to the current analytics competition in the market. Another route you could take (as we did) was custom analytics. Each business has specific behaviors and focus's that will assist them in further growth of their business.