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A guide to product analytics tools for startups
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#22If I can give an advice to the author. The structure of the article is not very good.
There is no best product analytics tool, the 3 products presented are all great products. Instead of saying "this product is the best". You should do,
- If you are in this case, use this product
- In this case use this other one.
- ...
If you are just a startup wanting to go into product analytics, any of this product will be fine
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#23Contrary to the main theme of the article, Google Analytics does in fact offer event based analytics in addition to page view analytics.
I was also befuddled by this. I was using event tracking with GA at least 3 years ago I think, so it was difficult for me to take this article seriously as it hammers on this point repeatedly
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#24Great writeup here but I have a question on whether Product Analytics is at all appropriate for Startups. I'm incredibly biased (this problem is why I built Chartio), but I think these tools end up being quite bulky, expensive and a non-agile way to do analytics on your product. I feel these products are best suited for later stage companies trying with great tracking detail to improve a funnel or engagement metric, not simply monitor usage.
The majority of the important things for a startup are usually already being tracked with timestamps in the database (new signups, new users, churned users, new todo items, etc). If a key metric is not directly tracked, there's usually a good enough proxy available somewhere in the database. A Busineess Intelligence product, or a SQL to chart tool is much more applicable and affordable in the startup stage.
There are likely going to be responses here "But what about..." and I'll premptively respond to those with the question: Could that be answered/solved almost just as well with a query to the database, without sacrificing the agility, extra setup and data collection time, and expense overhead? Those are all very costly things for a startup.
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#25So all the products recommended by Satchel ar YC products, huh
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#26We use event-based analytics. A super easy way to do it is to create an AWS Lambda function that you can hit using a Rest API. A simple `console-log` statement with JSON.stringify will log it to Cloudwatch logs. And bam, you can create basic charts and stuff with [Log Insights](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonCloudWatch/latest/logs/CWL...). Up to 5Gb in the free tier. Easy dashboards. All data is in AWS (so less tools to keep up with)
Tradeoff - their query language is poor, and I really want to do cohort analysis. But you can export as CSV, or easily push to Datadog.
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#27Disclosure: I work at Mixpanel We updated our packaging/pricing a few weeks ago. Our Free plan allows for 100k MTUs now (100x more volume), and our Growth plan is cheaper. https://mixpanel.com/pricing/ We wanted to make a big improvement in both these categories for customers: - "How far you can get without paying" - "Paid Plan Affordability" Just an FYI since that change happened since this Satchel review was publis…
Wow that's a game changer
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#28"Paid Plan Affordability" for Heap is listed as "noticeably better" (green), but on Heap's website, they either have a limited free tier, or a business plan "Starting at $12,000/year". Is that what's considered affordable for a startup? This whole website seems like a shill for YC companies.
Re: A guide to product analytics tools for startups
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
The suggested website gives me a white page? Need to unblock my content blocker to get it loading. Not a great start imho
I use ublock, but the site works fine for me. Are you blocking JS? Looking at the source code it's some kind of a javascript single-pager, built entirely in the app itself.
Nope, I am just using 1blocker for Safari