[tootie]

It's kinda nuts. They have some videos on startup school. They basically just threw spaghetti for months building random products for markets they barely understood until they landed on analytics and it just snowballed. This isn't even a brilliant idea. They entered a crowded market with a solution that was just a bit better than everyone else and now have a $3B exit.

[kfichter]

The invisible hand of the market sprinkles its fairy dust

[adventured]

If we capture just 0.03% of that fast growing cloud stuff...

And then they actually did it.

[XCSme]

I am currently working on a self-hosted analytics platform, and even though the space seems crowded, there are only a few good players. The thing is everyone started creating an "analytics platform", only that they just do it for money, thinking it's really easy to implement and don't care about the actual product, user experience or quality in general.

My point is, yes, the analytics market is crowded, but it's mostly crowded by low-effort players or archaic products. That being said, someone reading this will probably think it's a good idea to enter the market, thus leading to another below-average product.

[polote]

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in analytics there is this HUGE market which today is not addressed by anyone, its how to make more revenue from a website.

Segment is not even doing analytics, it has created its own market because no players in analytics has any interest if you want to make more money on your website. As website owners spend their time changing analytics tool, why not make a tool to make changes tool easier ? And that's Segment, they are even more useless than an analytics tool but well yeah nobody see it

[XCSme]

> Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important

This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it.

I do agree that just tracking analytics, without doing anything with the data, is useless, just like storing food in the basement and letting it rot.

Disclaimer: I have never used segment before, nor I had the need for a similar tool.

Segment is targeted towards enterprises, their price is too high for the average business, plus most of those businesses probably don't even use any analytics tools (or maybe just Google Analytics and look at visitors number only), so the integration offering doesn't really make sense for them.

> As website owners spend their time changing analytics tool, why not make a tool to make changes tool easier?

As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated.

As a personal note, my bigger goal is to make self-hosting and integration of web applications (in general) a lot easier for the average user, so anyone can spin up a self-maintained server running their favorite application with one click. So it's more about allowing anyone to use whatever tool they want, wherever they want, instead of just focusing on allowing them to select between a very limited selection of tools.

[polote]

(I'm only talking about Enterprise)

> This is like saying food is a scam and useless and that it's only important when you eat it.

Yes but everyone knows it for food, for analytics people expect it to solve their problem, which it will not do by itself

> As far as I know, changing analytics tools for the average business involves just changing a JS snippet on their site, nothing complicated.

Well not really, first except Session replay tools and everything recorded tool (ContentSquare, Heap) (and even for them it is far for being the case), changing analytics tool is a huge step, you need to recreate all your events, teach your users, install on your website (for an enterprise website, installing an analytics js tag is a huge thing)

> my bigger goal is to make self-hosting and integration of web applications (in general) a lot easier for the average user

To me self hosting and average user is not compatible especially in analytics where the average user barely knows how to use a computer.

Apart from that, it is not really clear to me what you are trying to achieve

[XCSme]

> Apart from that, it is not really clear to me what you are trying to achieve > To me self hosting and average user is not compatible especially in analytics where the average user barely knows how to use a computer.

This is exactly my point and my goal. First of all, when I mean average user I referrer only to those people that actually have a business/website to use those tools for, not to the average internet user. So, if they already have a website, they probably know at least how to purchase or even edit one (through code, WordPress or a visual editor).

My goal is that for those people, who are already technical enough to have their own website, "self-hosting" of their desired tool is just as simple as using 3rd party tools. It should not be harder to use self-hosted userTrack than it is to use Google Analytics. This is almost possible now, but the server/cloud providers are still working on providing APIs and services for making this more accessible.

Even now, you can go to certain GitHub repositories and click the "Deploy to Heroku" button, and with one click you have your own server running your desired application. The problem is that this is mostly limited to some hosting providers and to a very few applications. This should be possible to do, in an easy, secure and maintainable way for a wide variety of applications and hosting providers.

[switch11]

I reluctantly but wholly agree with everything polote wrote:

Currently analytics is a fraud, analytics is useless, it is what you do about that data which is important. Most of analytics/ab testing software are just giving data (which is sometimes not even accurate) to customers, so that the people in the analytics team have a job to do. But the reality is that only a very small fraction of those teams know how to use the data to drive more revenue. So if you want to work in analytics there is this HUGE market which today is not addressed by anyone, its how to make more revenue from a website.

*

I've searched high and low for analytics software that will let me

A) Measure the key things and come up with 80/20 Pateo Principle insights

B) After implementing changes, help measure the impact

Yet all analytics software seems designed to just capture stuff

That's all they do - 'capture stuff'

There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance

[XCSme]

I think the main root cause for this is that computers and AI are not smart enough yet to know "what's better" for your business/website.

Each business is unique, offers its own (almost unique) products or services, has a (sometimes hard to understand) user segment on the market, and each visitor is unique too. It is very hard to make some generic software that automatically gives useful tips on how to improve conversions, it can not tell "hey, reduce your price by 10% and start advertising towards cat owners instead of dog owners".

What analytics software does is exactly the point B you mentioned: allow you to measure impact of changes and take (yourself) decisions accordingly. You can decide to A/B test two different pricing strategies and see (based on analytics) which one converts better, but the software won't tell you what the A and B variants of the pricing strategy should be. You can test hypothesis and take decisions based on the resulting data.

> There are no provisions to leverage that data to actually make more money, or make your product better, or anything of substance I think this is due to, as mentioned by polote, the misunderstanding of the point of analytics: its purpose is collect and display data in such way that it can be analyzed (by a human or an external software) which can then take, based on this analysis and hypothesis testing, decisions that will lead to higher conversions. It's the same with people saying ads don't work and are useless: if you just create a poor ad, with wrong targeting, that leads to a shtity landing page trying to sell a bad product, you probably won't give a positive ROI and then blame it on the ad platform because it doesn't tell you why things are not working, but there are so many factors outside their control, it would be impossible for them to give an answer. You can only get an answer by looking in detail at the data of each step and understanding WHY something happens or doesn't happen. This WHY is very hard to tell even by experienced humans, so it would be very hard to have a computer automatically answer this WHY for us.

[tootie]

There's a hierarchy of needs. Segment and a lot of related services are geared towards data collection and instrumentation. That part is relatively easy and has a very mature market. The actual valuable part is to gain actionable insights and that remains stubbornly difficult. From what I've seen, it's the kind of work that still requires an experienced marketer with good instincts.

[fblp]

How was this market for customer data platforms "crowded" in 2012?! :)

[tootie]

The original product was really just a javascript utility allowing you to instrument your site and funnel data to other analytics platforms like GA or Adobe. The industry was coalescing on another approach (data layer) which still exists and probably has wider adoption. Segment used their position as a middleman to add more and more value as they matured and acquired customers.