[tipiirai]

Founder here (1). Here's a backstory: We launched the MVP two years ago with this HN post:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116

Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load yet.

Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is now useful — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include:

1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they convert. You can start optimizing the causes.

2. Faster A/B testing: Volument is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional A/B testing tools.

3. Privacy-friendly. Volument is on the same line with Fathom, Plausible, or Simple Analytics when it comes to privacy.

We've built a custom stack from scratch so this is not just another pretty face to Google Analytics data. We have full control and the door is open for pretty much anything.

The parent post links to a founding story and here's a direct link to the front page:

https://volument.com

---

1: Bit of myself: I'm a long-term frontend developer: the original author of semi-popular projects like jQuery Tools (2011), Head JS (2013), and Riot JS (2014). I'm also a co-founder of two other successful startups: Flowplayer (flowplayer.com) and Muut (muut.com).

[lukestevens]

Just wanted to say that is an exceptionally well-written launch post.

- Solid summary

- Novel solution (omg AIDA in a CRO tool!)

- Clear benefits spelled out vs the competition

- Relatable use cases

- Jumping off points to explore the rest of the product

The product of years spent thinking about the problem I guess! Good stuff :D

[rambambram]

I second Luke, very clear write up! However, I don't understand one thing: how are European visitors secretly tracked with Simple Analytics? I built my own statistics module for Hello Website. There's no tracking going around, so no cookie-bars for my user's visitors. I say statistics explicitly (instead of analytics), because I didn't add a conversion/goal/funnel-part. Even building some site statistics module for yourself gives you more accurate numbers then GA, that A/B-test went well. ;)

[tipiirai]

Just like Volument, Simple Analytics is a website tracker. It reads device information, like the URL and referrer data, and sends it back to servers for analytics, statistics, or similar non-essential stuff. You must inform the visitor if this device information is tracked as per local European laws that are listed on our data-privacy document:

https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

Both trackers are absolutely GDPR compliant because the visitors are not identified and you can of course just ignore the banner for all visitors, just like Simple Analytics advices to do, but that's a legal risk. Probably very small, but still.

Note that this is what we've told by GDPR professionals and not me interpreting the law.

Thanks for the compliment!

[tipiirai]

Luke — this just made my day, Thank you! In fact, this eases a lot of the angst from all the sleepless nights fearing of not getting any recognition.

[thehappypm]

Hey! Cool product! I have run many A/B tests in my career, and agree that it really does take ages to get statistically relevant results, and most results don't really pan out at scale. (Though in my experience, a new button color might drive conversion just by catching the user's eye as something new, but this doesn't stick around).

How do you get A/B test results faster? New math? Or just more BS? ;)

[tipiirai]

The secret is on Volument's ability to measure a bunch of "leading indicators", like the ratio of first-time visitors who stayed on the website more than 7 seconds (which indicates a better first impression). For every key conversion event at the bottom of the funnel (such as "signed up"), there are thousands of leading indicators to take insights from. By utilizing these top-of-the-funnel metrics you'll know whether the new version better in a matter of days — even hours on a very busy site.

Another fact is that Volument is a full-blown analytics software it already knows all the data for the baseline variant "A", so you only need to collect data for the "B" variant after a specific timestamp. Further cutting the measurement time by 50%.

More about the topic here:

https://volument.com/learn/

[rokob]

That sounds a lot like multiple comparisons type I error as a service.

[tipiirai]

Can you elaborate this, please? An example would be best.

[mritchie712]

> European visitors are secretly tracked without their permission.

This is quite a claim to just throw in and not footnote or back up in any way.

[wizzwizz4]

It is. I've had several discussions with Marko Saric (co-founder of Plausible), and I doubt he'd've let this slide even if his co-founder was Mark Zuckerberg. The author of “Only 9% of visitors give GDPR consent to be tracked”[0] is hardly the sort of person to secretly track users in violation of the GDPR.

Which part of Plausible's source code[1] is doing the tracking, exactly?

[0]: https://markosaric.com/gdpr-consent/

[1]: https://github.com/plausible/analytics

[tipiirai]

Plausible is totally and absolutely GDPR compliant so there is no need for a GDPR consent dialog, which essentially asks for a permission to track the visitor itself personally. GDPR is all about identities.

However, most European countries (like my home Finland) have a law that requires a "milder" consent to be asked when the visitor's device information is being read for non-essential purposes. There's no way around this[1]. These local laws stem from the ePrivacy directive.

[1]: https://volument.com/learn/data-privacy

[rambambram]

Thanks. Very clear now. Don't mind my question above about the same.