

Mixpanel Raises $10.25M - mynameisraj
http://allthingsd.com/20120510/hot-analytics-start-up-mixpanel-raises-10-25m-led-by-andreessen-horowitz/

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Mizza
Been thinking about switching to Mixpanel, but can't see any massive
improvements over the new Google Analytics, and it looks a lot more tedious to
set up.

Any opinions here?

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rogerbinns
I've been using both. The primary use case has been from a mobile app where
various events are tracked. There are also some extra pieces of data attached
to each event (for example the audio volume) called custom variables in Google
and properties in Mixpanel.

Google works really well with its out of the box reports. The UI once you are
trying to do more complex things gets somewhat bizarre, but you can generally
find out whatever you wanted. If you have a numeric custom variable then they
only show the average which is spectacularly useless - the distribution is far
more important. Their Android library only allows one tracker instance so you
can't have two different components tracking events against different ids.
There is no support, unless you fork out $150k per year (that is the lowest
price above the free plan). There is a way of doing data queries but I don't
believe you can get export the raw underlying data that was sent to them.

Mixpanel is very strange. My (perhaps wrong) conclusion is that it was
designed by an architecture astronaut. I mean data is just data so why not
abstract data into data. There are no precanned reports, and the reporting
tool requires conditions to be set when there is more than one item of data
being looked at (which is all the time because you are trying to correlate and
rank items with each other). It is frustrating to try and find out anything.
You do get to see more granularity on numeric values, but not as much as I'd
like. They do have support but all we got back was a bunch of platitudes.
Fortunately they do have an export mechanism so you can at least download all
of your raw data and write your own analysis code.

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kriro
_Doshi said he wanted to let it be known that he’ll use the funding to pay his
first 100 employees “way above market”_

Nice :)

Seems like a good company with a valuable product.

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throwaway15289
100 employees @ 100k = 10 mil. He will last a year?

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bignoggins
I'm assuming his company actually makes revenues since they charge, so most of
the salaries may be covered by revenues already and the funding will make up
the rest.

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nivertech

        octave:1> price_per_datapoint = 150 / 500000
        price_per_datapoint =  3.0000e-04
        octave:2> datapoints_per_months = 7e9
        datapoints_per_months =  7.0000e+09
        octave:3> revenue_per_month = datapoints_per_months * price_per_datapoint 
        revenue_per_month =  2100000
    

I guess they have discounted volume plans, otherwise it's looking too good to
be true ;)

UPDATE: using their 20M datapoints for $1600 plan, 7B datapoints per month
would bring "only" $560K revenue per month.

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jph
Congrats! I love Mixpanel for the results, and also the team is great. I
switched from Kissmetrics to Mixpanel and found the Mixpanel team to be solid,
smart, and very responsive.

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Skywing
I've known Suhail, online, for quite awhile. Good to see this news. Congrats.
I remember when he wanted to learn Django, now look where he's at. :P

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nirvana
I really shouldn't be building this myself. But looking at these prices for
mixpanel and kissmetrics, they seem out of whack-- great for profitable
businesses and enterprise, but way out of line for startups. Plus what if you
need between 25,000 and 500,000 data points per month with mixpanel? That's a
huge gulf and you go from free to $150 a month?

Some startups start with large customer bases but operate at a relatively low
margin per customer (because its extremely cheap to serve each customer.) For
instance, for $250 a month in hosting[1], I can service tens of millions of
customers, but buying either of these services for that many customers would
cost a lot more than the hosting.

Looking at real world metrics for one of my apps I'm currently collecting
enough data points (for free using Flurry) that to use mix panel would cost a
sizable (%15-%20) of the apps monthly revenue.

I'm not saying they're not worth it-- I'm sure they are. I just don't see a
way for a startup to onramp here. Our primary burn is keeping us housed and
fed, operations are being kept as cheap as possible until we have real
revenue. $150 is a lot. (though kiss metrics has a $30 and $80 plans which
alone means we're more likely to use them.)

[1] in part because hetzner's XE 4S servers are such a screaming deal- that's
about 5 32GB servers.

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suhail
We absolutely support you: <https://mixpanel.com/free/> \- instead of a
$30-80/mo plan, it's free! Of course, if you're averse to placing a badge on
your site, then that's a different problem.

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Danieru
Shouldn't that be no-followed?

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Danieru
To defend my post, mixpanel is providing copy/paste html with a link for
people to put into their footer in exchange for services of monetary value.

Could someone explain why this does not qualify as an ad?

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patio11
On Google's _published_ guidelines and guidance, this is white hat, as the
links are editorially chosen (you, the webmaster, really are specifically
intending to endorse them for their analytics services _because you use their
analytics services_ ).

The _shadow rule_ is that any linkbuilding method is kosher iff no one has
figured out a way to scalably achieve rankings on very competitive terms with
it. For example, citations on the footers of blog templates were 150% A-OK
right until people found out that was a scalable way to rank e.g. for e.g.
[printer cartridges], [payday loans], etc etc. See also widgetbait, quizzes,
etc etc.

