Ask YC: Feedback about one of our service, LLOOGG

[antirez]

Something like one year ago I wrote http://lloogg.com in few days. It started like an hack to have a "web 2.0 tail -f access.log" but then I started to add features and wrote a little "PRO" account with adsense tracking, a bigger history, and so on. The result was an invite-only real time traffic analysis tool with something like 1200 users currently.

The problem was that we lack a solid business model, so after one year the service is provided in a best effort way. When we did it one year ago the feedback were "It is cool", but now the question is: is LLOOGG still something we could try to invest on? Or it's just plain better to sell it to interested companies here in Italy (there are a few) for not too much money?

Your feedback will be appreciated. Note that in order to post this here the registration is open for the next couple of days, to get started is as simple as paste a bit of javascript on your site/blog html.

Thank you very much, Salvatore

[sfamiliar]

This looks interesting. If I were critiquing the display, I'd say sub out the various browsers and os's with icons of each for readability, with icons for bots and the like as well .if a non-unique user accesses the page while his last request is still within some time period, increment a counter on his next request. Each log entry's display definitely needs to be simplified, and the real-time stat box in the upper-right should update, and give a 'since' time, as in (33 unique visitors since midnight) with an option to reset. Also, you should allow users to pause or slow down the display of traffic with a bar across the top of the log display indicating how many requests are pending display.

As for monetization: your target audience is fairly narrow, though if you cleaned it up somewhat, it could not only serve the needs of a given web-strategy team (who'd like the real-time stats), and it could be an effective alert method for folks who don't have that built in. I'm not sure what an annual revenue stream would look like, given the size of the target audience. If you don't have a potential revenue stream, your options for getting investment capital are limited.

(If it were me, I'd sell to interested parties.)

The most important thing is the business model. You provide a service: that of seeing real-time updates on website traffic, by page, with a clear and intuitive display, allowing a company's analysts to get an instant sense of their traffic.

That's your core business. Graphs and traffic stats are covered in the market, focus the business model on what isn't covered yet. You could do quite a bit with the display, making it more 'game-like', and even provide comparisons with other sites that you track.

[antirez → sfamiliar]

    > If I were critiquing the display, I'd say sub out the various browsers and os's with icons of each for readability, with icons for bots and the like as well.

Right, I agree about this. Bots are not a concern since the tracking is via javascript that will filter every kind of bot unable to run javascript (for now 100% but I guess at some point will'll start to see this kind of bots).

    > As for monetization: your target audience is fairly narrow, though if you cleaned it up somewhat, it could not only serve the needs of a given web-strategy team (who'd like the real-time stats), and it could be an effective alert method for folks who don't have that built in.

Exactly what we think is that for this for succeed we basically need a way to have more or less the same kind of user base as feedburner.

    > (If it were me, I'd sell to interested parties.)

I think we'll go for this option even if it is a bit sad. I build other products in the past and I reached good deals, but I'm starting to be very sad of the fact I can't build a product that just is a real busines: I give a service, people give me money.

    > You could do quite a bit with the display, making it more 'game-like', and even provide comparisons with other sites that you track.

This is an important point as well, for example AFAIK Analytics does not give any public API in order to get information about the number of pageviews/visits a blog is doing. An opt-in stuff in the preference (again feedburner alike) may do the trick along with some kind of widget to show how much visitors you have and even real time logs to your readers.

Thank you for the feedback

[jdvh]

The concept is pretty cool, but the target audience may be problematic. People must be tech savvy enough to be able to read and understand log files. But I don't think you can really compete with the power of a console with grep, so that may be where you get stuck.

Is it for web developers, sys admins, or regular joes with a website?

[antirez → jdvh]

jd: the target audiences are two, people with a blog (it is very easy to get addicted to see visits in real time) and people that want seriously optimize the site structure, we have many users that reported that using lloogg to see how single users navigate their site resulted in changes that improved sells, registrations, and so on.

Btw note that even if the original idea comes from tail -f access.log the site is designed to show visits in order to be readable by non-tech people.

Thank you very much for your feedbacks.

p.s. About "grep" we are implementing filters to do similar things visually.

[spoiledtechie]

People love Google Analytics. They can't get over the amount of information it has. Sure folks do want to see there information and they might enjoy the real time you guys give them.

BUT, they aren't going to waste away their day doing something unproductive... Looking at visitors is unproductive. The average real blogger only looks at stats once a month or so. I know from experience that it gets old to look at stats and the live stats might be something cool, but over time the people that look at the live stats will also get bored and move back to something like google...

I hope that helps. Its a good idea though... I do like the concept.

[antirez → spoiledtechie]

    > BUT, they aren't going to waste away their day doing something
    > unproductive... Looking at visitors is unproductive. The average real
    > blogger only looks at stats once a month or so. I know from experience
    > that it gets old to look at stats and the live stats might be something
    > cool, but over time the people that look at the live stats will also get
    > bored and move back to something like google...

I think I understand what you mean, in the pratice we did the following: from one hand we tried hard to make real time logs even if time consuming useful because you just see patterns that are not visible via analytics.

Another feature is adsense click tracking (only PRO for now), this makes you able to check who is clicking on your site/blog, so if you are running an AD-founded site you know if traffic from google is paying your bill more compared of other referers and so on.

On the other side we added a small section of history in LLOOGG, this works for the free accounts too, basically you can see over the time unique visitors, page views, returning visitors, with simple graphs very similar to the ones of feedburner. You can select to view history stats by day, month, year and if you want to use or not a logarithmic scale.

After one year we are pretty sure that the product is useful, our main concern is if it is useful enough for the target audience to pay for it, and even if so, how many free accounts we need to run in order to be able to get 1 paying user? Will this single paying user pay for all the free accounts we need to get it? We are not sure the answer here is yes. To this add that we are in Italy and here to setup an way to allow US people to pay is not that simple. And no, Italy is not a good market for paying products, people are not comfortable paying for online services for a lot of reasons.

Thank you for the feedback!

[spoiledtechie → antirez]

Have you thought about posting this kind of information on your front page? I would have loved to know about:

Another feature is adsense click tracking (only PRO for now), this makes you able to check who is clicking on your site/blog, so if you are running an AD-founded site you know if traffic from google is paying your bill more compared of other referers and so on.

On the other side we added a small section of history in LLOOGG, this works for the free accounts too, basically you can see over the time unique visitors, page views, returning visitors, with simple graphs very similar to the ones of feedburner. You can select to view history stats by day, month, year and if you want to use or not a logarithmic scale.