How we were building the wrong product

Overall I think analytics aren't as good a market at they sound.

The basic problem is that they are something you bolt onto your business after the fact rather than something that is core to running a business. They are a "nice to have" rather than "have to have" and when something new comes along it is too easy to replace them.

"5 basic events through the Kilometer.io API (website visit, user signup, app visit, user cancel and user billed) so that we can automatically calculate 25 charts and metrics we believe every SaaS company should have."

25 metrics from 5 data sources seems... overkill?

SaaS for Saas companies seems to be a hard market, because the SaaS company is likely to just build what they need themself, no?

From a similar experience I have found this to be true. Specifically:

  - one size fits all is very difficult to do.  most companies have a critical feature that is unique to them

  - the CEO is likely to view this kind of product as 'trivial', without really considering how much engineering effort it will take / they really need that custom feature.  so yes they build it themselves.

  - very small companies are not comfortable providing 3rd party access to their db

  - larger companies want more than this

  - the selling cost to companies tends to be high enough that going the low cost / high volume route is difficult, quickly driving you into consulting level prices / a more fully featured & tailored product

You make it sound easy and obvious, but the problem is that customers doesn't actually know what they need. They know what they think they want, but they usually want something very much tailored to their business, using their ideas, and their workflows, but at a price of $10/month because it's a SaaS app. Building something that works for many customers means you actually have to come up with a very astute compromise between what the customer thinks they need and what they actually need, and sell the product to them by persuading them they don't actually need the things they just want.

On top of that there's an added problem that customers are often wrong. They tell you what you want to hear, or worse, they tell you what they want to hear. And you have to work out what's really needed based on those conversations.

My startup failed for this exact reason. We listened to our potential customers, we talked to them in focused test groups, we built what they said they needed, we showed them prototypes, but at the end of the day they realised what they really wanted was something else, and in many cases the pain we were solving (managing project requirements) wasn't even that important to them. By then we'd run out of funds. The end.

Will their next post be "How we were building something that already existed for the last 10 months"? Because this a lot like https://www.geckoboard.com/