Show HN: Heap is a new approach to analytics. Just capture everything • Hacker News Board

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

#191

Post by anonfunction » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 12:38 AM UTC

icelancer wrote: post #175

anonfunction wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your right, but like everything else there are pros and cons and tradeoffs that should be considered.

Lacking conversion analysis is not a "con." It is a mandatory feature in something like this.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/20294656.jpg

Seriously though, for my purposes I'm much more interested in tracking events of my current users. Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs (and budgets!)

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

#192

Post by jessep » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 12:52 AM UTC

samstave wrote: post #184

goronbjorn wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You might notice that those are all YC companies also ;)

HA! - No, I didn't notice that at all... Good point, thus those customers might be "load test" and "POC" and not necessarily paying...

Stripe launched and developed this way (yc first). Seems to work out pretty well.

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

#193

Post by kerno » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 1:17 AM UTC

Looks like a great tool and I'm looking forward to putting it in action.

But, what's with the robot and spaceships blowing up a city in the background of your site?

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

#194

Post by michaelmior » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 1:34 AM UTC

Strange. I was just envisioning a service like this last week. Cool to see someone actually building it. Best of luck!

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

#195

Post by oijaf888 » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 2:00 AM UTC

orangethirty wrote: post #177

Samuel_Michon wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that depends on what kind of conversion you're after. If you just want to harvest email addresses, then sure. If you're looking for satisfied paying customers, this kind of trickery won't work. If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to give something for free — free tier, 30 day trial, ebook, screencast, etc. Having visitors fill out an account form is not a gift to them, it's a gift…

The issue here is that I'm sharing findings from my own data. This is not me making stuff up. I have actually used this very same button text to increase conversions (up by .04% on a site with thousands of visitors). It was not used to harvest emails. A practice that simply does not work, unless you plan on sending Viagra ads. I don't do such things. If you build a button that promises something for free, you need to…

Does that actually work on B2B products that are in the hundreds or thousands dollar range every month? I don't think that cost is really an issue in that world if its delivering value at a large multiple, its more integration/implementation worry. Perhaps I'm wrong though.

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

#196

Post by samstave » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 2:14 AM UTC

jessep wrote: post #192

samstave wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HA! - No, I didn't notice that at all... Good point, thus those customers might be "load test" and "POC" and not necessarily paying...

Stripe launched and developed this way (yc first). Seems to work out pretty well.

I didn't mean to imply it was a bad thing!

Just that on my first post I saw "customers" thinking they may have been more traditional customers.

But after being informed they were YC - it made sense they were more likely load-test and POC customers that help participate in the product evolution.

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

#197

Post by Randuin » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 2:14 AM UTC

dubcanada wrote: post #39

mbell wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE8 is a complete mess in comparison to modern browsers. To support IE8 you often have to go through a lot of extra work after the site works in modern browsers to get it functional even if your not doing something particularly complex. At the very least its often a whole bunch of different CSS / replacing CSS with images to get the rendering to look decent. In addition a lot of 'Show HN' posts tend to use 'cool new…

IE8 is perfectly fine, and also somewhere between 20-30% of your users. If you have an analytics software that doesn't work in IE8. You lost analytics for 20-30% of your users. And since array.prototype.slice.call is not supported in IE8, this analytics software is about 80-70% useful. And maybe even less if you have a large IE clientele. Seems strange to me that one would limit themselves that much.

I thank God everyday for our outstandingly small IE population

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

#198

Post by corwinstephen » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 2:29 AM UTC

matm wrote: post #112

azov wrote: post #103

What happens if I'm a smallish site and suddenly get slashdotted / DDoSed? Will I be charged thousand dollars? Is there a way to cap monthly costs?

With the current model, your charges would spike. Which is bad. But we plan to offer caps and the option to auto-sample if you exceed your tier.

Perhaps something like Cloudflare might serve as reasonable insurance against DDoS?

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

#199

Post by physcab » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 3:22 AM UTC

TylerE wrote: post #169

stdbrouw wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 $.

Can you put your email in your signature? I'd like to ask you more questions about your analytics needs and have you check out a project I'm working on.

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

#200

Post by argonaut » Sat, Mar 23, 2013, 3:45 AM UTC

anonfunction wrote: post #191

icelancer wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lacking conversion analysis is not a "con." It is a mandatory feature in something like this.

http://cdn.memegenerator.net/instances/400x/20294656.jpg Seriously though, for my purposes I'm much more interested in tracking events of my current users. Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs (and budgets!)

Icelancer is right. Conversion analysis for landing pages is is a core, mandatory component. If I'm going to have to use something like Mixpanel for the landing page, then I might as well use Mixpanel for everything. "Obviously for you conversion funnel analysis is important, and thats cool, but realize everyone has different needs" is a severe understatement of how crippled an analytics platform would be without conversion funnel analysis.