mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."
I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.
To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.
I was at a start-up with a website that had exactly one page. The page had a photo of a bank vault, a company logo consisting of 2 letters, and a phone number.
That was perfectly fine. The business was not a website.
Alright – I don't know what that business actual was, but surely it was a business – that's great. That's one type of a business.
Another type of a business is software products. A business like that can basically be a website. Or more fancily, a web app. Or a mobile app, or a desktop app, or a CLI, or a smart TV OS, or anything else written with code that gets used by people.
Now, people need different things, come from different backgrounds, just behave differently. Analytics software simply helps you learn how your thing actually gets used. Do people drop off somewhere in some flow? How do people use this feature you just built? How many users do you even have? Plug in an analytics service's library and find that out with minimal effort. The basic advice for startup founders is: talk to users. That's qualitative research – product analytics is just the quantitative counterpart. Both have value.
The business was software products, built to order, delivered on CD-R media, starting in 2005. The company grew pretty well, doubling in size every 20 months, eventually to be acquired by a large defense contractor. The website probably wasn't needed at all. Getting customers was simple: look for a SBIR contract that is interesting, then bid for it. Analytics software would have angered the customers enough to kill the business, and it may have been prohibited by contract or by law.
I've seen other software and mostly-software businesses where analytics software was out of the question. One example was a company that made an underwater device. Another example was a company that made an OS that got used in military equipment. (add analytics software if you want to live in prison) Not everything is on the internet.
mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."
I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.
To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.