
How we were building the wrong product - tzipis
http://kilometer.io/blog/how-we-were-building-the-wrong-product-for-the-last-10-months/?ref=news.ycombinator.com/newest
======
mkohlmyr
The fact that they feel the need to have mixpanel, segment.io and hotjar on
their webpage doesn't exactly show confidence in the product :p

Analytics is such a saturated market at this point. It will be interesting to
see how things shake out in terms of consolidation / niches / price ranges.

It is also interesting to me that they decided to invent yet another format in
which customer data must be exposed. Just like the previously mentioned
companies.
[https://www.w3.org/2013/12/ceddl-201312.pdf](https://www.w3.org/2013/12/ceddl-201312.pdf)
(shameless plug: [https://github.com/mkohlmyr/ddl-json-
schema](https://github.com/mkohlmyr/ddl-json-schema))

~~~
nacs
I saw it mentioned while doing searches a while back and ended up on Quora
where a Kilometer rep says in his post:

> our users often call us "Mixpanel _on steroids_ " [1]

I then click through to find ironically, that Kilometer themselves use
Mixpanel..

[1]: Screenshot:
[http://thumbsnap.com/i/kFfmeZEx.png?0310](http://thumbsnap.com/i/kFfmeZEx.png?0310)
(from [https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-Mixpanel-
alternative...](https://www.quora.com/What-are-the-best-Mixpanel-
alternatives))

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mapleoin
Will their next post be "How we were building something that already existed
for the last 10 months"? Because this a lot like
[https://www.geckoboard.com/](https://www.geckoboard.com/)

~~~
BillinghamJ
And as far as I can tell, there are around 20 companies offering exactly the
same thing in this space - most of which have been around for a couple of
years already.

Not sure it's a good idea to pivot into this space.

------
PaulHoule
Overall I think analytics aren't as good a market at they sound.

The basic problem is that they are something you bolt onto your business after
the fact rather than something that is core to running a business. They are a
"nice to have" rather than "have to have" and when something new comes along
it is too easy to replace them.

~~~
striking
It's the difference between a vitamin and a pain-killer.

You want to make pain-killers, because people _need_ them.

Vitamins can be helpful. But people don't usually need them.

~~~
thaumasiotes
I would have put money on this example being structured the other way around.
People can live with pain; they can't live without vitamins. They only don't
need vitamins in the same sense that people don't need oxygen.

~~~
joshuacc
Pretty sure that the post you're responding to meant "vitamin supplements."

~~~
striking
That's it, thanks.

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palumbo
Not being familiar with this product to begin with, I'm wondering if he gave
up on his product too quickly!? In my experience customers are typically wrong
and misinformed - the whole "faster horse" concept at play. Instead of
acquiescing to his customers whims (I want what I want when I want it), could
he have had a viable, differentiated product in the market if he would have
worked on selling, onboarding and educating about his product's POV. More
often SaaS products are selling an idea combined with a methodology (Slack is
a good example of this). You need to sell the idea that your organization will
benefit from doing it "our way" rather than "your way".

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rubidium
"5 basic events through the Kilometer.io API (website visit, user signup, app
visit, user cancel and user billed) so that we can automatically calculate 25
charts and metrics we believe every SaaS company should have."

25 metrics from 5 data sources seems... overkill?

SaaS for Saas companies seems to be a hard market, because the SaaS company is
likely to just build what they need themself, no?

~~~
andorov
From a similar experience I have found this to be true. Specifically:

    
    
      - one size fits all is very difficult to do.  most companies have a critical feature that is unique to them
    
      - the CEO is likely to view this kind of product as 'trivial', without really considering how much engineering effort it will take / they really need that custom feature.  so yes they build it themselves.
    
      - very small companies are not comfortable providing 3rd party access to their db
    
      - larger companies want more than this
    
      - the selling cost to companies tends to be high enough that going the low cost / high volume route is difficult, quickly driving you into consulting level prices / a more fully featured & tailored product

~~~
tarr11
Another problem is that for startups, these metrics change all the time. Often
you start measuring something to diagnose a problem.

Once you have done that, you don't need to diagnose it any more.

Also, I'm not sure how a few pretty charts help me here.

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burnallofit
The pitch in their email is "plug & play SaaS analytics tool".

This pitch tells me nearly nothing. It doesn't say what I would use it for,
what benefits it offers, how it stands compared to other solutions on the
market, or even any details about what platform(s) it supports. So basically
unless I happen to currently have _no solution and am actively looking for
one_ , then I don't care. Which I would guess is about 99.999% of the people
who received their email.

~~~
jmiserez
The way I understood it is that the people receiving such an email were
already on the beta-test invite mailing list. So they knew about the product
already.

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toumhi
Yep, users don’t see the value in the product (as shown in the email from the
user). “plug&play analytics” does nothing to explain what’s new and why it’s
worth my time.

Based on the info from the post, there was no specific need and ideal customer
profile in mind for creating this product.

It’s not like an unknown problem, but it’s crazy how often startups have fell
in the “do stuff no one needs” and wasted months or years on it. It seems to
be one of these things where you need to experience it yourself to understand
it.

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mattiemass
Great, open reflection on the product. Thanks for sharing!

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fuzzythinker
Off topic.. Your logo arrow (and favicon) looks a bit like a body part to me.

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estefan
> It took us almost 10 months to put our product in the hands of real users.

Almost wondering if I should read the rest of the article at all...

How did they expect to build the right product without collaborating with
their target customers? Is this a company staffed by psychics?

TLDR; Prototype with customers before you build anything.

~~~
onion2k
You make it sound easy and obvious, but the problem is that customers doesn't
actually know what they need. They know what they think they want, but they
usually want something very much tailored to their business, using their
ideas, and their workflows, but at a price of $10/month because it's a SaaS
app. Building something that works for _many_ customers means you actually
have to come up with a very astute compromise between what the customer thinks
they need and what they actually need, and sell the product to them by
persuading them they don't actually _need_ the things they just want.

On top of that there's an added problem that customers are often wrong. They
tell you what you want to hear, or worse, they tell you what _they_ want to
hear. And you have to work out what's really needed based on those
conversations.

My startup failed for this exact reason. We listened to our potential
customers, we talked to them in focused test groups, we built what they said
they needed, we showed them prototypes, but at the end of the day they
realised what they really wanted was something else, and in many cases the
pain we were solving (managing project requirements) wasn't even _that_
important to them. By then we'd run out of funds. The end.

~~~
skyhatch1
We took similar actions at my recently failed startup, which headed on a slow,
downward path. I identified an apparent pain in our target market based on
past conversations with friends working in that space. My team and I felt we
validated the pain because we kept hearing about it in our face-to-face
interviews with potential users & buyers. One interviewee even went into mild
theatrics half way through his interview, "Stop! This keeps us up at night
because we ..." That was just the beginning of his 10 minute proclamation that
the problem was worth solving, and that they'd pay a decent amount for the
solution. Exactly how he said it.

We developed what we thought and what our potential customers claimed was a
solution to an unmitigated problem in a very sensitive financial process. We
followed startup advice and made it clear that we would charge for the
solution. Fast forward a few months: usage dropped from supercharged to
minimal then to nothing. Most of the customers we worked so hard to acquire
went back to their old ways. When we did followup calls, their newer recruits
were none the wiser that we even built something specifically for them.
Clearly, the problem wasn't that important in the grand scheme of things.

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infecto
The pop-up without a close button was a bit of a deal breaker.

~~~
csears
The close button is there in the upper right hand corner, just not visible
when reading in landscape orientation. Rotating to portrait allowed me to
close it. Very annoying.

