11–20 of 79 posts
The dashboard api is amazing. We only need a few simple numbers, and the API works fantastic.
Thinks like custom dashboards are cool, but we're able to just grab the numbers onto our own that we have melded with other services as well.
Your growth discovery engine feature looks pretty cool, as does the event path report. This looks similar to conversion path reports I've seen in GA's attribution data.
Unfortunately, a lot of times those reports look nice but don't help much because they fail to provide meaningful insights when dealing with any sort of user volume. I've always wanted some sort of zoom out view that lets me view color-coded patterns or something like that so I can visually get a sense of what is going on and let my brain's pattern recognition abilities go to work to spot clusters. This is what in turn informs the questions to feed into your growth report, since your customers may not know the right questions to ask yet. Providing tools to give the answers isn't enough, you have to provide tools that spit out the questions ;)
Here is the reality of how this works. Someone on the business side sees a shiny dashboard and wants one. The product involved gets pitched over the fence to engineering, and we go to the site. We know from go that we are fucked cause the header doesn't mention API/Developer or the words integration. Because we have a JOB that we probably like we click on help...
Oh look integration docs, Maybe there is hope for this turd!
Wait I'm on zen desk? There are broken pages (there are broken pages)? No public forms (well at least they aren't apparent).
This tool like the 16 other analytics packages we run, are going to be a flash in the pan, or so narrowly defined that it will be single use. Im not going to put anything useful in here, because, well when we hit that cap we will be asked to "cull data" rather than pay.
Keys to success in this space: Give a shit about the guys implementing your service. If you can't be bothered to build and run and host your own documentation I don't know what to say. If your going to send me to a third party, at least have user forums / public user communication front and center. Let me know that people are having issues, that your addressing them.
Give me a way to tier out data. Yes you sold my business person on the "free" tier thats nice. Let me give you the data they are going to want at some point, let me do it in such a way that you can put it in cold storage till I need it. Give me a way to back it up to your S3 at cost, or to where I want (my own S3 my own data storage solution for free). Give me a way to "keep myself under the cap" by moving the data I want around.
A while later, some business person wants to see "something new" in the dashboard... Well guess what, we have been collecting that all along, go pay the vendor get the history and see it in real time. If you can do THAT without having to involve ME as an engineer then you have a winner on your hands, otherwise your just analytics implementation 17 and we will move on to 18.
"Analytics is often the single largest infrastructure expense for a company." I'm interested in seeing some supporting evidence. Listed references do not refer to any study or real evidence. This may be true for companies that entire strategy is analytics or ad-based. (See Deloitte 2014 CIO survey -- lots of companies not even doing analytics or feel they are not spending enough on analytics.)
Are you Safe Harbor compliant?
Are you Safe Harbor compliant?
Hi all, founder of Amplitude here. We've always felt volume based pricing to be bad for analytics culture as it discourages tracking and so are taking as aggressive of a stance as we can here. Would love HN's feedback!