

Ask HN: Review my startup - benologist
http://www.swfstats.com/

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mitchellh
I've made a few "bigger" flash applications (for fortune 500s and the like)
and in general I don't see the benefit of this versus Google Analytics[1],
which provides a Flash tracking API[2]. All your points you note on the left
side I've done in one way or another via Google Analytics.

I admit that the google analytics flash API only allows you to track "events"
and sometimes pass a numeric value with an event which analytics will mean for
you, but in practice, I've found that that is often all that was requested by
my employers. e.g. "We want to know when people go from A => C => B, vs. A =>
B => C." Easily done! "We want to know the average time a user spends on this
panel" Done!

So could you explain to me some features you have that google analytics
doesn't have? And justify their benefit enough such that a company would
sacrifice a single analytics account to view all their web analytics for two
sites to view their page and SWF analytics separately?

[1]: <http://www.google.com/analytics/>

[2]:
[http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/flashTra...](http://code.google.com/apis/analytics/docs/tracking/flashTrackingIntro.html)

~~~
benologist
An excellent question and one I should have prepared an answer for earlier,
sorry it took me so long to reply!

We're really targeting two different markets with the common thread being
Flash but two very different uses of it. In some cases you could force the
relevant data streams into GA but you're working against the system and
yourself from the very start - gaforflash is not the same as ga for flash
games, which doesn't really exist and has no community of developers to help
you figure it out.

Google Analytics is fantastic at what it's designed to do, which is track a
site and with gaforflash pieces of Flash on a site. There are a few key
reasons why that's not a good match for casual games:

1) GA is from the ground up designed to presume the people are coming to you,
and it's the opposite with the casual game business, our games go to 100s or
1000s of different websites. Straight away you lose a lot of the functionality
that makes GA great because it just isn't applicable / usable.

2) Events don't transfer directly to the structure of games, in general as a
concept they do and especially compared to our custom events, but when you
start digging into per-level and tracking multiple streams of data and
multiple values on those streams it becomes complicated and difficult to
interpret the results and even to figure out just how you're actually able to
track these things.

To put it in perspective, if I quit on level 1 is the category quit and the
action level 1, or vice versa, or both? If I collected 30% of the coins then
the problem gets bigger - category level 1, action collected, value 30%? Or
category collected, action level 1, value 30%, or category collected 30%,
action level, value 1? These are all the right answer, together, but now
you're tripling the requests you're sending back to Google and creating so
many events that you start jeopardizing the ability to interpret what's going
on.

The other issue with the complexity of GA is most of the time you only get one
chance at getting this stuff right - and there's a lot you need to get right
otherwise the data's useless - because after your game's being distributed you
can't easily push changes out to all the sites your game will be on.

3) The gaforflash api is heavy - 160 kilobytes - which is an expensive
addition in terms of filesize and especially performance, both of which are
critical in casual games where we might already be cramming a ton of work into
a 30-times-a-second loop that already doesn't run well on whatever
office/college/school computer the player's using.

------
benologist
So following my post the other day about how exactly people go about launching
a beta we just leapt in and opened up. We scored a nice blog post from a
prominent blogger in the Flash game space which has doubled our userbase
already, and we're working hard on even more features to better-align us with
the requirements for social games, and to go even deeper into casual game
tracking.

It's going to be a very interesting February seeing how we cope with all the
new games being added. :)

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faramarz
I would put an action call at the bottom of your price chart. while the user
is there, get them to test the system or sign up. present an opportunity to
make a decision.

~~~
benologist
Just this comment alone has made it worth posting here, I didn't even think of
that heh.

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espadagroup
I would work on some landing page optimization. For example the Join our Beta,
which I am assuming is your call to action right now should be on the left
side of the page and above your stats bar. Also, the first big text the user
sees should be you main value point, at this point the first big text doesn't
even include the word Flash or Game.

~~~
benologist
Thanks, I fixed that up most of that after you posted earlier, the join button
I'm in the process of relocating.

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espadagroup
I would work on some landing page optimization. For example the Join our Beta,
which I am assuming is your call to action right now should be on the left
side of the page and above your stats bar. Also, the first big text the user
sees should be you main value point, at this point the first big text doesn't
even include the word Flash or Game.

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oman121
It's somewhat difficult to read the numbers in the middle of the page.

~~~
benologist
Thanks I made the text darker so it stands out more clearly.

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paraschopra
I think a demo will really help in showing what your app does.

