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Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

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Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#161

Post by pindi »

DodgyEggplant wrote: post #12

Poor man's analytics: events, client side, server side, whatever. Set up a separate DB with one big table, many columns for properties. One server call to write an event (a row), one ajax call to write from the client, throw it wherever you need. A bit of good old simple SQL for queries and reporting, and you are done.

I have a system exactly like this at my company, with a prettier UI on top of the SQL querying. I've been considering open sourcing it for a while; I wonder if there really is a demand for this, or if it's one of those things that everyone prefers to roll themselves.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#162

Post by stdbrouw »

TylerE wrote: post #69
raviparikh wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely - we offer a one month free trial of the lowest tier plan (2500 users/month).

I would highly advise you to rethink that. What if we're a larger site? To be honest, your pricing is way out of our ballpark anyway (We're a smallish daily newspaper, ~300k uniques/monthly), there's no way I'd ever get approval for $20k/yr for analytics, no matter how cool, and I'd never get approval to spend $1k+ just to try it. For orgs like us, your pricing seems rather brutal, as we're probably much lower in pag…

Newspapers routinely find the money to pay $570/mo and up for ChartBeat, and then never use it, or I-don't-know-how-much for Adobe Omniture when they could have Google Analytics for free. So I don't think you're representative of the news industry as a whole.

Also, content-heavy sites have different analytics needs from applications. It'd be interesting to see where Heap fits in, but most of the analyses you can run in KISSMetrics, Mixpanel and other app-focused analytics tools aren't of much use for news organizations.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#164

Post by eddmc »

web007 wrote: post #42
matm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our bottom tier (which includes a 1 month free trial) lets you track 2,500 users/month. That said, pricing is really hard to get right. There's basically zero chance we nailed it on the first try.

You definitely didn't get it right. =) That's one of the joys of startup life, A/B test it until you do! Even for a "successful" site (>1mm MAU) $2,000 a month feels insanely expensive. The performance difference between this and GA ($0) is not high enough _initially_ to offset the sticker shock. Look at NewRelic, Tracelytics or even Mixpanel (expensive IMO) for better pricing levels. You've built the equivalent of "…

I'm not saying that Heap have got the pricing right but you should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#165

Post by huhtenberg »

cheald wrote: post #122
huhtenberg wrote: post #48

Welcome to the blacklist. I, for one, very much object to all my clicks and "activity" on a page being captured and streamed down some black hole for god knows what purposes. Not to worry though - you are in a good company with all other analytics services out there. The only difference is that you are far more open (and proud?) about how obscenely intrusive your service is, so you get an honorary 2nd spot, right aft…

That "purpose" is generally to help service providers understand you better so that they can provide a product that better serves your wants and needs, as their customer.

Say, you have a desktop client-server app. Outlook, for example. How would you feel if it were uploading every click on the menu and every mouse move (in the confines of its window, of course) to the server. Strictly to help the developer improve the product and make it better for you, their customer. This should be totally OK with you, right?

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#166

Post by eddmc »

web007 wrote: post #42
matm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our bottom tier (which includes a 1 month free trial) lets you track 2,500 users/month. That said, pricing is really hard to get right. There's basically zero chance we nailed it on the first try.

You definitely didn't get it right. =) That's one of the joys of startup life, A/B test it until you do! Even for a "successful" site (>1mm MAU) $2,000 a month feels insanely expensive. The performance difference between this and GA ($0) is not high enough _initially_ to offset the sticker shock. Look at NewRelic, Tracelytics or even Mixpanel (expensive IMO) for better pricing levels. You've built the equivalent of "…

I'm not saying that Heap have got the pricing right but you should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#167

Post by eddmc »

matm wrote: post #115
pc86 wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know you're reworking the pricing page as you said but you may want to consider doing what a lot of email service providers do and list the per-user price in tiers. Something like * Users 1-2,500: $0.01/user * Users 2,501-20,000: $0.0625/user * Users 20,001-80,000: $0.0583/user might be a tad more intuitive, especially if you listed the top-end price along with that.

This is interesting. Our naive thinking was "fewer numbers" implies "easier comprehensibility", but I don't think the pricing was quite as understandable as we would've hoped. I like your suggestion a lot.

Keep the pricing message simple. I'm not a fan of variable pricing - I like to know what the monthly cost is going to be beforehand. I appreciate tiers where I can see what I'm going to hit depending on growth over time.

Someone below said that you should base your pricing on cost - I completely disagree. You should absolutely NOT look at cost when you put pricing together - rather, you need to ask your customers about the value of what it is you're providing. For example, Heap will be saving the time and hassle of deploying a generic solution on a server and the time of customising it. Plus Heap will be improving their product every day whereas the self-hosted version would need a developer to add new features. These sort of things all add up - you'll be surprised what you find out when you ask your customers.

Pricing is hard. There are a lot of good articles and discussions on HN if you do a bit of searching.

Good luck. Heap looks good

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#168

Post by eksith »

Hovertruck wrote: post #140
eksith wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's very true. We don't have the same complaint about programs specifically built on one family of operating systems not working on another. That also speaks to how much we depend on the browser these days to act as an OS in a way, particularly for full featured applications that depend on (relatively) new technology.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#169

Post by TylerE »

stdbrouw wrote: post #162
TylerE wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would highly advise you to rethink that. What if we're a larger site? To be honest, your pricing is way out of our ballpark anyway (We're a smallish daily newspaper, ~300k uniques/monthly), there's no way I'd ever get approval for $20k/yr for analytics, no matter how cool, and I'd never get approval to spend $1k+ just to try it. For orgs like us, your pricing seems rather brutal, as we're probably much lower in pag…

Newspapers routinely find the money to pay $570/mo and up for ChartBeat, and then never use it, or I-don't-know-how-much for Adobe Omniture when they could have Google Analytics for free. So I don't think you're representative of the news industry as a whole. Also, content-heavy sites have different analytics needs from applications. It'd be interesting to see where Heap fits in, but most of the analyses you can run…

That's a misunderstanding of the industry, I think. While the website as a whole isn't very "appy", some smaller sections of it _are_, and it would be incredible to actually understand how our customers are interacting with it.

P.S. We used to have Omniture, and switched to Google to save $.

Re: Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything

#170

Post by bravura »

Can you discuss how you address the "schema-on-read" problem?

One of the downsides of the cheap bit-bucket approach of tech like NoSQL and Hadoop is that it's easy to get the data in, but harder to get it out. The producer of the data has less work. The consumer of the data now has more, since there are no longer guarantees on the structure.

An emerging 3rd-wave approach is that of an "eventual schema" (see http://arunxjacob.blogspot.com/2011/11/schema-on-read-not-so... by Arun Jacob, chief of data at Disney). But best practices for eventual schema are immature and evolving.

How do you approach the problem of getting data out, and allowing people to use common concepts to query their data?

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