Why do a HN launch with "request an invite"? This seems like a common anti-pattern.
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Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
131–140 of 213 posts
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#132Why do a HN launch with "request an invite"? This seems like a common anti-pattern.
My guess is that most products that do this aren't much further along than a weekend hack. It's pretty easy to throw up a marketing site, and it let's you quickly see if people are interested. Thing of it as a μMVP :D
They have a list of customers at the bottom of their splash - this looks like its more than a weekend hack...
They may just not have the infrastructure to support a widely available service yet.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#133Anyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of Googlicide[1])? My app is in dire need of user-tracking and analytics, but it's a self-hosted application and many of my clients run it on LAN segments that don't have WAN connectivity. 1. https://www.google.com/urchin/
Piwik ( http://piwik.org/ , GPL 3, PHP-based) is perhaps the best analytics solution that you can host on your own.
Thanks! I'll definitely look into this.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#134Anyone know of a decent user-tracking / analytics package that isn't SaaS? And isn't log-based, like Urchin (which I just discovered is yet another victim of Googlicide[1])? My app is in dire need of user-tracking and analytics, but it's a self-hosted application and many of my clients run it on LAN segments that don't have WAN connectivity. 1. https://www.google.com/urchin/
http://piwik.org/ http://snowplowanalytics.com/
Thank you!
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#135[deleted]
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#136Why do a HN launch with "request an invite"? This seems like a common anti-pattern.
Our thinking is that it's an efficient way to grow responsibly while still gathering user feedback early and often. We tried to include as much tangible product as is possible with an invite-only product.
Feel free to launch with whatever you like, i just dont agree with calling an invite page 'Show HN' as it's misleading.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds really interesting. Could you describe how you do that a bit more?
Sure. The simplest approach is to use a naive Bayesian classifier (you can find a bunch of open source implementations). In my app, I actually track client-side actions -- essentially, clicks, but with more context. Anyway, you can treat a single user session like you would the text of an email, where the "actions" are the words. From there, all you need to do is capture a bunch of sessions and tell the classifier wh…
I have done something similar before but also measured which content was being consumed. Are they readers, listeners, or watchers?
Eventually, you can pretty easily detect the best way to approach each potential client from a marketing perspective.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#138Earlier quoted context omitted.
That sounds really interesting. Could you describe how you do that a bit more?
Sure. The simplest approach is to use a naive Bayesian classifier (you can find a bunch of open source implementations). In my app, I actually track client-side actions -- essentially, clicks, but with more context. Anyway, you can treat a single user session like you would the text of an email, where the "actions" are the words. From there, all you need to do is capture a bunch of sessions and tell the classifier wh…
We've been thinking about a lot of the same things you mention here. Send us an email at team@heapanalytics.com, I'd love to chat some time.
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#139Looks great! I'm mostly intrigued by the ad-hoc Group By query functionality. Traditionally that's an indicator of some sort of relational database on the backend, but is that the case here? On the other hand, the dynamic nature of the data makes me inclined to think that they're using MongoDB or something similar. In the past I've had to create similar systems but we denormalized the data coming in based on pre-defi…
We initially tried to build this on Mongo, and it was a huge pain. I'll need to elaborate on why at some point, but the very ad-hoc nature of all our querying precludes any non-relational database from being our store (at least any that I'm aware of).
Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything
#140The demo page ( https://heapanalytics.com/dashboard/demo ) fails in IE8. Is it just me or IE8 is just not considered by web startups anymore ? Sorry to deviate a little but every time I try to look at a "Show HN" in IE8 (work computer), it fails for about 85% of the time. I could understand that some startups heavily depend on latest browsers but what about others ?
It's not your imagination. For Heap, it would be a bit unwise to ignore IE A lot of new projects on the front page lately don't work on IE9 either. I lost count of the number of shiny new things (usually involving HTML5) that just show a plain black (/white/gray/blue etc...) screen on IE9 and I'd need to fire up Firefox or Chrome just to look at it. To be fair, not all of these are catering to IE based browsers (and…
I can speak to this a little bit, actually.
Chartbeat has never supported IE, which as you say sounds like cutting off a major part of your market. Even moreso when you consider our customers which include pretty much every major publisher in the US. However what we've learned is that if your product provides enough value, people have no problem installing Chrome or Firefox or whatever.
To this day we receive pretty much no requests for IE support at all, which enabled us to build a product with heavy HTML5 (mostly canvas) and CSS3 usage.