People should pick analytics according to what they want to solve. Is it some combination of monitoring or insight, pure insight? Are those insights the result of just aggregates, or is it user behaviour driven and requires cohorts and funnels, etc?
One of the questions that should be asked before you hear the answers people give is "What is your medium and what problem were you trying to solve?".
You can imagine that Stripe does a lot of business via their API and would want insight into usage and potential problem areas. Part of this may be solved by log file crunching, but part of the API may be considered to be a funnel if multiple calls are present... what solution did they use since they could not use one of the many JavaScript drop-ins?
Email marketing and push notifications have their own problems too... how are they getting their insight? Did they all use personalised tracking links, what was the best for this use-case?
The problem with "There are a lot of solutions to pick from" stems from everyone's problem being subtly different.
For the most part web analytics in a general sense is a solved thing (Google Analytics), but as soon as you start asking company/product specific questions about the behaviour of your users you may want to consider Mixpanel, rolling your own, etc.
I think most people's answer will add more noise to your decision rather than reduce it. I don't know how to start a poll on HN but it might just be simply to get a show of hands, determine the most used tools, and then go and take a close look at just the Top 3 or 5.
> I'm especially interested in hearing from the YC startups, since I figure there maybe a set of analytics tools that are suggested to you guys by the YC partners based on the collective experience of past YC classes.
I would think that YC companies and alumni actually try and help each other such that YC companies probably use another YC company product more out of shared benefit than a perfect match.
I would guess that part of the reason they would use Mixpanel is for this reason.
One of the questions that should be asked before you hear the answers people give is "What is your medium and what problem were you trying to solve?".
You can imagine that Stripe does a lot of business via their API and would want insight into usage and potential problem areas. Part of this may be solved by log file crunching, but part of the API may be considered to be a funnel if multiple calls are present... what solution did they use since they could not use one of the many JavaScript drop-ins?
Email marketing and push notifications have their own problems too... how are they getting their insight? Did they all use personalised tracking links, what was the best for this use-case?
The problem with "There are a lot of solutions to pick from" stems from everyone's problem being subtly different.
For the most part web analytics in a general sense is a solved thing (Google Analytics), but as soon as you start asking company/product specific questions about the behaviour of your users you may want to consider Mixpanel, rolling your own, etc.
I think most people's answer will add more noise to your decision rather than reduce it. I don't know how to start a poll on HN but it might just be simply to get a show of hands, determine the most used tools, and then go and take a close look at just the Top 3 or 5.
> I'm especially interested in hearing from the YC startups, since I figure there maybe a set of analytics tools that are suggested to you guys by the YC partners based on the collective experience of past YC classes.
I would think that YC companies and alumni actually try and help each other such that YC companies probably use another YC company product more out of shared benefit than a perfect match.
I would guess that part of the reason they would use Mixpanel is for this reason.