
Mixpanel (YC S09) Takes Stat Tracking Beyond Google Analytics  - trefn
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/y-combinators-mixpanel-takes-stat-tracking-beyond-google-analytics/
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vaksel
I think you guys need to rewrite your pricing page, at least tell the user
what a data point is

    
    
        If you send less than 20,000 data points per month,   
        Mixpanel is free.
    
        If you will be sending more than that, we have a tiered 
        pricing model:
    
        Contact us for high volume pricing.
        * $0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent
        * $0.25 per 1000 points - next 150,000 points sent
        * $0.15 per 1000 points - all points after that
    
        This pricing includes data storage, analysis, and 
        bandwidth.

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trefn
yeah, it's a bit rough. A data point is a single event you send us - when a
user plays a song, pokes someone, or makes a purchase.

~~~
patio11
You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. Geeks love
them, particularly if the algorithm to calculate the price is spiffy. I have
yet to see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them.

Here's an anecdote for you: our industry is going cloud cloud cloud right now
and I am pushing it internally. Enthusiasm among management for test projects
is high -- I'm presenting one today, actually.

(I rewrote an internal app on the App Engine. It took two days for a
prototype, will take two more for getting it production-ready, total cost and
schedule less than 10% of when we had more senior, more talented engineers
implement the version we are actually using.)

So in this process of "Hey, we don't have to actually host hardware here!"
evangelism I actually tried to get a purchase order for Slicehost approved for
a different project, where I said something to the effect of "It is going to
cost us X,000 yen when I'm in development, and X0,000 yen when we move it to
production, and Y0,000 yen if this app gets really popular internally."

This purchasing request broke my manager.

He told me that he'd rather get a request for ten times the highest price I
quoted, than try to figure out how he was supposed to incorporate conditional
logic into his budget and reporting forecasts for this quarter.

Are you sure you don't want to be selling my manager the low-cognitive-pain,
easy-to-buy, ten-times-more-expensive version?

$0.35 per 1000 points - first 50,000 points sent

Boom, you just broke my manager. Not only are you requiring forecasting and
conditional logic from him, you're requiring math.

Small Business: $20

Web Application: $100

Enterprise : Call Us

There, now we have an unbroken manager. I ask for $100 a month (not because we
need it but because my manager won't approve the Small Business so I won't
bother asking), he asks "Are you sure we aren't Enterprise?", I say "Yeah, I
did the math", he says "OK, approved."

[Edited to add:

Incidentally, in my own business I'm a stats junkie. There are currently three
types of tracking scripts on my pages, plus my rolled-my-own bits, and you
very well might be #4.

That said: I pay $19 a month for CrazyEgg, which has given me some very
valuable insights into user behavior in the past, so valuable that I continue
paying for it on a monthly basis despite not actually using it in most given
months.

At the moment, for example, I think I have no experiments actually running.

Now, hypothetically if I were already using MixPanel and savoring that time
you made me a thousand dollars by increasing my conversion rate, but didn't
currently have an experiment running, you might not be making money from me.
That is sort of suboptimal for you, isn't it? I'm willing to pay you _for
nothing_ if you have previously delivered wins to me and if I think I might
get another win at an unspecified point in the future. This dynamic has earned
CrazyEgg about $250 of free money from me. Do you want free money? ;) ]

~~~
lacker
_You may want to consider rethinking the metered billing model. I have yet to
see evidence that people who pay for stuff like them._

How about Amazon's cloud services? Lots of people pay for those.

Your story is sad but it sounds like the problem might be more the
relationship between you and your manager rather than a problem with all cloud
servies.

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mrlebowski
How much can they scale? And how much historical data would be stored? I am
working on crunching huge weblogs right now and looks like they have already
solved the problem (on a smaller scale? The website doesn't talk about traffic
that they can handle)!

~~~
suhail
We have people sending us millions a day, we should be fine.

~~~
snprbob86
I think the original poster is interested in your service, but wants to be
confident he can trust it.

"millions a day" builds confidence but " _mostly_ under control" puts it right
back here we started. Maybe a little bit more detail would put him (and
others) at ease?

~~~
suhail
The reason I said "mostly" is because it's naive for anyone to think they have
things perfectly under control. No scaling problem is always solved, there's
always things that show up. We have it largely under control and are very
capable of handling it.

~~~
mahmud
A good way to end people's fears of your scalability would be to introduce an
individually licensed instance of your service and inviting the client to keep
things under their own control (if not in their intranet, then on a dedicated
host under their control.)

~~~
paraschopra
Won't this involve handling over the code itself? I am toying with this idea
for my startup but the fear of code getting leaked has prevented me from fully
embracing it.

~~~
mahmud
Depends on what their code is written. I handed out a lisp binary and an image
dump; I update it once every 2 weeks and I send them a single .core file as an
attachment.

If you insist on exact version compatibility, I am sure you can dump images
from most mainstream dynamic languages or ship intermediate "compiled" object
code.

There is also the option of getting them a standlone host and billing them
extra for its monthly costs. Failing that, there is always the law.

Most companies just want to improve their business processes and use tools to
make them more profitable in their line of work; just think of how much
software you use, and see how many of your vendors do you feel like competing
with. If anything; quicker money is made from asking the vendor for a reseller
license and agree on a partnership and sales commission.

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kylemathews
I've been using mixpanel for a few weeks now -- nice software. The integration
(PHP, Javascript) was very easy and the data presentation is easy to
understand albeit still a bit rough.

~~~
mjpizz
ditto. Adding Mixpanel tracking was incredibly quick in both Javascript and
Ruby, and setting up basic funnel stats is far simpler than with Google
Analytics. They've also been really responsive to suggestions.

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billclerico
Love the service - I had it up and running in 5 minutes

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aberman
I have seen Mixpanel in action, and I think it's by far the best solution out
there.

Congrats on the official launch.

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nkohari
Looks very promising. I'm going to be taking a closer look for our
application.

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myoung8
Only took us a couple of minutes to get things set up too. Congrats on
officially launching guys! Looking forward to seeing where this goes.

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fariz
we've been using mixpanel for our facebook apps since launch and it's helped
us greatly, and our entire team loves it. even the pm understands the stats
without asking questions (which is usually not the case).

understanding how a user uses the application has not only helped us figure
out what features the user wants, but also which of those actually WORK (in
real time).

love it.

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modsearch
good stuff! I especially like the real-time stats

