[mwetzler]

I think there is definitely an opportunity to help companies understand their GA data, but our company Keen IO is proof that Big Data is not too fat for startups. We're finding a big opportunity in helping developers build custom analytics backends and white-labeled analytics. We've found the big bucks are made supporting customers with truly big data challenges. We can provide the scalability and reliability that would be arduous and expensive for them to build in-house.

[bliti]

Let's say I have a data analysis startup. My market is dentists with three or less offices. How would your Big Data solutions work for me?

(Real question. I am developing this business as we speak).

[mwetzler]

That's awesome! This isn't really a "Big Data" problem - dental transactions don't happen in the scale of billions per month. However, the transactions themselves are very valuable for the dentists --- that's great for you! You can provide insight without having to crunch a zillion data points.

This is an example of an industry vertical analytics solution. Our hypothesis is that analytics products will be created to support all kinds of use cases like this (insurance analytics, manufacturing analytics, distribution analytics, etc). We want Keen IO to be the platform on which people build those solutions.

The way we can help you is to first make it easy for you to reliably collect data from all your dentists (with client libraries). Then we expose all that data, and of our analytics capabilities (e.g. queries), by REST API. You can log into Keen IO and create a line chart, then copy and paste the javascript right into your site. Now you can build a completely white-labeled website for your dentists, while we take care of storing and querying your event data. Our scoped API keys will allow you to secure the data so a given dentist can only see data for her offices. You can also create an internal dashboard for your team so you'll able to do analysis across all the dentists. Hopefully you'll discover industry trends and benchmarks that you can use in marketing reports or to resell to the dental industry (assuming your dentists allow this!). I bet they would like to know how they compare to other dentists...

Anyway, this is too much fun. Let me know if you want to brainstorm more!

[bliti]

You mention collecting data, which has been a big issue in this market. The local dentists (this is an offline startup) use a closed sourced program that does not export data. The only way to retrieve any data is to use automation scripts that "read" from the screen and dump it into CSV files (they use excel a lot). Once that is done, the script calls another one that sanitizes the data and inserts it into the database (PostgreSQL, in this case).

I currently have a flexible API that allows me to make complicated queries by sending commands through an HTTP call. Say "GET /clients/where/__last-visit/20132009" and so on.

On the front end, I have a fairly custom dashboard for each dentist (they all have specific needs due to different business sub-specialties). The dashboard calls the API and creates the reports automatically. They are update n amount of times a day, depending on the metric being observed.

Given this information, and the one you provided me, can you give me your insight into how different your offering would be?

My aim is to reduce complexity, and reduce business costs. Without eroding the service or client experience. I'm interested how my "small data system" would compare to yours in those terms. It may sound like I'm being pedantic, but I am genuinely interested in learning more. You could be the solution that saves me hundreds of hours of development time.

[mwetzler]

Hmm... that does make your data collection tricky. Ideally you have something that captures events as they happen, in a nice format, rather than waiting on summary report views.

Looks like you already built an API similar to ours, but if you ever reach scale/maintenance/availability bottlenecks then check us out.

Most of our customers use charts that query in realtime when the page loads or the user adds a filter or whatever, but batching reporting like you describe is a way to optimize the page load time.

Generally we want to help developers before they already built the solution themselves. I think your homegrown solution is probably exactly what you need right now to validate your product in the market. When you want to invest more in your architecture for improved performance, scalability, or reliability, then you can consider building v2.0 on Keen IO :)

[bliti]

I appreciate the response. The system is still fairly new, and in development. My options are still pretty much open. Just waiting on more paying customers (but aren't we all?).