[zer00eyz]

It always strikes me that data collection and data analysis are tightly coupled, when it comes to pricing. And then when you look at the tiers that are available (995 a month really?) it makes even less sense. Yes its cheeper than me hiring in house to "do it myself" but it still feels like I'm being taken advantage of.

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.

[sskates]

Really sorry about issues on Zendesk, thanks for pointing them out! We've rolled out new docs today and are still ironing out a few bugs. Any pages that aren't working for you in particular?

Also- totally agreed on there being a lot of other analytics products out there, which is why we felt the need to be aggressive with giving away so much data for free.

What do you mean to tier out data? Would love to hear how we could make it compelling for you.

[zer00eyz]

Its not that there are a lot of analytics products out there, its that most places have a lot of analytics implementations. One of them could do the job, and probably do it well, yet we keep adding more of them. Lets break down why.

1. Product person A, adds your product into the stack and pushes RIGHT UP to the limit you have set. 2. Product person B needs "some new slice of data" but guess what... your 12k annual cost is way more than they want to or need to spend out of their P/L, and their data is going to push the organization over the cap, so they look at a new product.

1. Product person A adds in your product to whatever portion of the platform they are responsible for. it lives in a vacuum there. 2. Product person B comes along and lacks awareness or training on how to use your tool. They can implement another tool, get free training and not have to involved them selves with product person A.

1. Product person A adds your product into the stack, the engineers who implement it find issue with your API/documentation/support. 2. Product person B wants to add your product into the mix, and the ENGINEERS say "were not doing that again find another vendor".

All of the above situations create "fragmented" insights. As an example one of my employers used Mixpanel for mobile analytics. They were happy with "real time sales numbers" but the reality of "were not shipping a sub set of those orders" is where the rubber meets the road. Not only does fragmentation make it hard to get real insight but it makes it hard to troubleshoot things as well.

You want my data, take it, but take ALL of it. Don't just take the events I want to send you, take the logs, take it from mobile and web, take it from the backend systems, take it from my shippers. Take more than JSON over http, let me open up a socket and give you the fire hose, give me librarys in Go, java, php, python, C*. Give me a set of logging tools that gets you that data quickly. Give engineers a way to send you more context than just the user (process, session, transaction, response time). Give me a way to tell YOU what data to keep "hot" and what data to archive... Just take all the data. If you have it all in one place, your going to make the engineers life easy, the first time some product person runs up and says "conversions are up on our new launch" and wants to take credit for the UI changes, and I can lay a graph of response times over it and say, "well it might be cause the server is faster, and people aren't walking away" your going to not only have my business but everyone else I can convince to adopt your product.