Hey Charlie! We've been back and forth on this in the lifetime of the startup, but we're now doing all metrics ourselves, so it is internally built. I built an early version of the cohort analysis (which didn't scale, but that didn't matter) just a few months in and it was massively valuable. It's not too hard to knock something together.
Thanks for the answer Joel!
By the way - I'm curious why you guys had to built this internally - I always get the feeling people prefer using a 3rd party service like kissmetrics than building something.
I custom-built my own cohort reports but as number of users grow in my own app, I'm planning to replace it with MixPanel. You don't really want to put stress on your own database servers which are meant for production, not for analysis.
You should not be doing analysis (OLAP) on your main transactional database (OLTP). Moving from transaction-processing system (TPS) to analysis is done through a process call ETL (Extract, Transform, Load.) You will want to transform your data into facts and dimensions -- this is going from a relational model to a multidemensional model (using a star schema.)
but that would be another system to maintain. I'm happy to outsource this to MixPanel or some other company. My needs are pretty generic. I appreciate your response though.
Yes, I 100% believe in focusing on your core competencies. If the OLAP is self-hosted or external, the key takeaway is to not do analysis against production (once your data set is larger than RAM ;) before that, who cares?)
