

Ask YC: Review Trendly, new analytics app from the folks behind Dabble DB - avibryant
http://trendly.com

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lsb
So here's the thing: I'm not going to give you my Google Analytics until you
show me a compelling reason to. "We track Google Analytics" doesn't mean
anything to me, an intrigued audience, yet skeptical of and resistant to just
installing shit willy-nilly.

Install it on the company blog or something.

~~~
avibryant
Agreed that the front page is light on info/screenshots etc. Did you click the
"how it works" link?

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icey
You may want to include a link to the "how it works" section from
<http://trendly.com/preview/>.

When I went to the site, I clicked "try it now" before I read to the bottom of
the page, and once I got there, I didn't want to sign in. Maybe say something
like "Not ready yet? See how it works" or something like that.

~~~
catton
Agreed. Will do.

~~~
attaboy
Done.

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icey
Any chance of getting a demo like Dabble's?

I assume you did this one in Seaside as well? Every time I see a project
you've done it makes me want to fire up a Smalltalk image and try it out
again.

~~~
ben
This project has nontrivial pieces written in Squeak, Java, Ruby, and
Javascript. The site has a dash of PHP.

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natrius
Care to share the rationale behind those choices? Sounds interesting.

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catton
Sure, in brief: Smalltalk because we're most productive in it, Java for some
code that particularly needed to be performant, and Ruby because it's better
than the other two at interacting with the OS/tying all the pieces together.
Obv JS for client-side whiz-bang.

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martian
The mid-page sparklines are surprisingly informative.

Simple request: Would love to be able to click on referring domains to visit
their websites.

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ABrandt
It appears I'm more trusting of my Analytics data than most (could be because
my site garners little traffic). The copy on the front page was clear enough
for me to warrant a trial, and I felt that I knew what to expect from the very
beginning.

I found the sign in process quick and painless--sign into Gmail, agree to
grant access, and now sit anxiously awaiting my email of data. The "how it
works" section that I was shown directly afterwards was also very clear. As I
read the content and followed along with the screenshots, it all just made
perfect sense. All in all, great job!

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tdavis
Your homepage is really confusing to me. The first thing I find is a logo
which is a link... to the page I'm on. That's useless and confusing. Next the
"Try Trendly Now" bar, which looks more like some kind of horizontal-rule
style header than it does a link. Then there's a tiny "How it works" link that
sorta looks like a header too, considering there is a paragraph of text below
it (which is the same size as the link, and it's just some "about" copy!)

You should make better use of modifiers which produce contrast and a hierarchy
of importance, such as text size and color. I imagine this isn't your final
homepage, but having it start off more intuitive couldn't hurt :)

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quizbiz
I want an analytics system that I can give different style sheets to, it will
apply them like in AB testing automatically, and show me the performance
results.

Google analytics is good enough for collecting data but how do you help us
implement the data?

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ganjianwei
Small thing about the UI: as large as the "Try Trendly Now" button is on the
main page, it didn't really occur as a button to me until I happened to mouse
over it. Maybe I'm just not used to a link looking like that.

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emmett
It's taken more than 2 hours to get my results - I'd love to get an email
saying "After looking at your data, it looks like it's going to take N more
hours to finish the results".

~~~
avibryant
Yeah, that would be good. The main bottleneck is in sucking all the data down
from Google's API - for a site with as much traffic as justin.tv, that can
indeed take hours. Once that's done the processing itself is relatively quick.
But that's certainly something we could notice and let you know about.
(Consider this your notification for now...)

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attaboy
After reviewing some of the comments, I've made the "Try Trendly Now" link a
bit more "clicky".

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piranha
Nice thing! But you have problems with unicode text (for example, with
cyrillic).

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boundlessdreamz
looks good from the screenshots! Have tried to approximate this with
visualization etc but that never worked well enough. have submitted my
analytics. Waiting for the result.

What about pricing when out of beta ?

~~~
catton
Thanks.. you should be getting your results pretty quick (longer if you have a
high-traffic site). Pricing is still an open question. We're talking about
$5/month intro pricing for now, but presumably it will eventually be based on
the traffic volume of the site/amount of data we're processing.

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gojomo
Looks cool. Should have clear privacy policy given the sensitive business
information that's being collected.

A hint of pricing would be nice, too, though I can understand you may just be
in the collecting-feedback, sending-feelers stage.

