
Show HN: Volument – A new take on website analytics - tipiirai
https://volument.com
======
iraldir
I wish there was a lower price brackets for smaller side projects / app etc.
Something like a "pay-as-you-go" sort of price, as in, 50$ per 10000 views but
not capped to a month. I think your approach works a lot with the sort of
philosophy from the lean startup etc, but that sort of philosophy encourages
to put products to the public with very little user and focus on quality. If I
make a side project that brings me 100$ a month, paying 50$ for analytics
seems too much. Also, the sort of user that do such side / small projects
might end up championing your products in their main job if it's nice.

~~~
tipiirai
I can hear you. Volument is indeed built with startups in mind and we're going
to start with the current pricing. Let's see what the future holds.

~~~
brudgers
Is the company sustainable at only $50/month?

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volument
Hey everyone. We built this thing over the past few years after realizing that
we could not really understand from traditional analytics how our visitors
truly behave and convert. We wanted to measure the AIDA funnel (awareness ->
interest -> desire -> action) that all the marketing books and growth essayist
talk about, but not truly applied to analytics. We have implemented this
together with a couple of customers and it is now ready for the public eye.

Happy to hear your professional feedback.

Thanks!

~~~
C4stor
I would have put a volument solution dashboard applied to the volument website
itself somewhere prominent to demo how it works, plus if it's real time enough
it would be ultra cool to see change while I browse the website (for example
if it floats somewhere ? I'm really bad at UI ^^).

On the current state, I left the website after a short reading session (~3
minutes) and I'm really unsure what is it you're selling exactly !

~~~
tipiirai
In short: we're selling analytics that is specifically designed for conversion
optimization. Right now you are forced to use a bunch of different tools to
get some vague idea whether your website updates were genuinely good or bad.

We see the temptation for real-time analytics and could possibly that for
marketing or entertainment purposes. However, the real value in Volument comes
from the data that is aggregated from the longer term visitor behavior. How
many returned after the first visit? How many re-returned? Which market
segments are engaging the most? Who brought the most traction? Believe it or
not, the current analytical tools fail to give answers to these basic
questions. This is because their internal data model is not designed to answer
these questions.

We have tried our best to explain the product in these "Problem" and
"Solution" articles:

[https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-standard-
analytics](https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-standard-analytics)

[https://volument.com/learn/how-volument-
works](https://volument.com/learn/how-volument-works)

~~~
C4stor
I read both pages, and I think they do a very good job of explaining the
problem part. I don't think they do as good a job of explaining what exactly
is the value Volument brings.

As an other commenter pointed, it's not clear whether the images in
[https://volument.com/learn/how-volument-
works](https://volument.com/learn/how-volument-works) are actual screenshots
of the product running or just there to clarify the points, and if they are
not screens of the product I'm left with no screen of what exactly will be the
product.

To me, it does feel a bit like when you're interviewing someone for a
position, and they're not able to really separate their own contribution from
what their team achieved.

Just my 2 cents though, I wish you the best :-)

~~~
volument
We tried our best to explain the value of Volument on the features page:

[https://volument.com/features/](https://volument.com/features/)

The solution page just explains the technical details. We mostly use abstract
images when explaining things. The demo works like the product works.

Thank you for the feedback! Definitely valuable and something to take insights
from.

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Theodores
I think the good ideas that make the product compelling and innovative are
hidden too far away from the elevator pitch. Measuring engagement after the
page has loaded rather than before is an extremely good one.

This you can do with other solutions but most people don't bother, even if
they are SEO experts.

I think some fettling is needed to reach decision makers with a pitch that
they can understand assuming goldfish attention spans, then you could be on to
a winner.

~~~
datenhorst
I actually like that their approach isn't like your typical SaaS website's
where there's only buzzwordy elevator pitches and it's impossible to find out
what the product is actually about.

Here I take 5 mins, read through "The problem" and "The solution" pages and
feel treated like an adult.

~~~
abraae
I like it too and this site is beautifully created to that effect. I find it
inspiring for our site. I only wonder if perhaps it's an approach that speaks
more to techies.

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rsweeney21
I thought I would share my experience signing up for your product in case you
find it helpful.

I'm actually shopping right now for a solution for conversion optimization and
lead attribution for our website (www.facetdev.com). I read almost every page
of your site, but it was still not clear how your product works and what it
does. I signed up anyway to give it a shot.

Sign up experience went smooth. After I completed the sign up process, and
installed the snippet, I ended up on the Team page. I wasn't sure where to go
next. I clicked on Traction and it took me to some demo website date for Acme.
I tried to use the team drop down to pick my website, but it wasn't listed
there. I tried for 5 minutes to find my website, refreshed the page, clicked
other links, etc.

The 7th or 8th time I clicked Traction it took me to a blank page. Then a page
with two empty sections that say Not Enough Data. It still says that now. I'm
not sure what I'm supposed to see in these sections. I don't know what "Market
traction" means.

I couldn't really tell how the product worked before signing up and I'm more
confused now. Rather than telling me "Not enough data", maybe tell me what I
should expect to see here and when? The behavior page is also presented
without explanation. The "Changes in Behavior" panel has some stats at the top
that don't make sense to me.

My feedback is that you are introducing too many new concepts for me -
terminology is new, data visualizations are new, app layout is unusual, the
settings tab/flyout on the right is unusual, and the app is blended with your
marketing website.

If your product does what I think it should do, the pricing is good, maybe a
little low.

Hopefully this is helpful!

~~~
volument
Thank you for the feedback! We take these points seriously since they are
critical. Especially the issues on the onboarding flow. The main problem
currently is that the product leaves you in rather confusing state after
installing the embed code. We will fix that next.

Your other points are also valid and will be addressed. I really like Hacker
News — hard to get this valuable feedback elsewhere.

Thank you "rsweeney"!

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sudheendrach
Looks cool! Love the focus on "goal/conversion optimization". Would you be
interested in building an integration w/ Segment? We can highlight you in our
Catalog, this way 19,000+ Segment customers can discover and try your tool
with just one click. Let me know, I'm at sudheendra [@] segment.com

~~~
tipiirai
We certainly are. We will first cover all the issues mentioned on this thread.
We want to focus on building a solid, reliable software instead of acquiring
tons of people.

Thanks for the opportunity!

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ferduk
Seems a bit expensive to me. How do you justify the high prices compared to
other analytics tools?

~~~
volument
We hear mixed voices. Most people seem to think $50/month is cheap for a
small- and medium-sized company (with lower volumes).

For bigger sites Volument is indeed more expensive than Mixpanel for example,
but we justify that with providing data that helps them do more of those
valuable conversions.

And Heap Analytics is much more expensive for bigger sites than Volument.

~~~
StavrosK
I have some side-projects that have a few pageviews a day and make a few
dollars a month. They would be a perfect way for me to try out your service
and keep it in mind for larger projects or work, but I don't want to spend $50
when that's many times my monthly revenue.

Maybe it would be a good idea to have a free tier for something like 1000
pageviews per month? Just an idea.

~~~
oo0shiny
I second this. I'd love to try it out on some low-volume side projects before
recommending it to some of the larger sites I work on.

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reitoei
The design is wonderful, I love it.

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xrd
I'm getting an error when I attempt to "set up". I don't see anything until I
open the JS console:

"/api/validations:1 Failed to load resource: the server responded with a
status of 500 ()"

It looks very compelling!

~~~
tipiirai
This is now fixed. Thank you for reporting this critical bug!

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JLehtinen
I've seen a sneak peek before and learned that things evolve pretty quickly at
this point :) Cannot wait to see where all this goes, congratz on the release!

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sbashyal
Love the product concept and the problem / solution descriptions. I am not
your typical customer though as I was already aware of the limitations of
existing solutions.

I just signed up for this and set it up in our website. I have a couple of
questions: \- Is the analytics realtime or does it take time to process
events? \- Is there minimum data threshold that is needed before anything
shows up in the dashboard?

~~~
tipiirai
Currently the views are generated once per hour. Everything in Volument is
based on aggregation, ie we look how much "traction" is generated in the first
1, 3, 7, 14, or 30 days (based on your ability to retain visitors). All that
important information is not real-time.

We see the importance of real-time tracking on the initial onboarding phase so
that it's easier to debug things and see the potential setup errors.

We're just getting started so not everything in place yet.

Thank you!

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ahmaman
Nice design and looks promising! greetings from Finland!

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play6
We definetly need analytics toools like volument.com! Great job and what a
design! Keep up the good work

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hadrien01
One important point that I don't see anywhere on the website is if to use this
service do I need to add a GDPR banner? Does it use personal user data (like
an identifiable number for each user) ?

Because if it does, I need to add a GDPR banner and opt-in mechanism, which I
don't want. It is possible to do funnel analytics without using PII, and I'd
like to know if Volument allows that (without their Tracking conversions
feature obviously).

~~~
tipiirai
This is an important point and needs to be addressed on our site. Volument
client stores an unique client id to localStorage, and I'm _pretty sure_ GDPR
banner is needed for that. We're investigate and extend this document about
the topic:

[https://volument.com/learn/user-privacy](https://volument.com/learn/user-
privacy)

Thanks for pointing this out.

~~~
Keats
FYI on that page the text is too thin, it is hard to read. Removing the font-
weight: 100 CSS rule fixes it.

~~~
tipiirai
Crap.. Which page and what browser? Thanks!

~~~
Keats
[https://volument.com/learn/user-privacy](https://volument.com/learn/user-
privacy) on Firefox

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J32S
Looks like an interesting new product. I will test it out!

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ixtli
pedantic note: shouldn't "No analytics is like Volument" be "No analytics
_are_ like Volument." ?

~~~
stronglikedan
Perhaps not, according to Wikipedia anyway.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytics)

