One of the most key steps to building a succesful startup is figuring out what works — and what doesn’t. To do this, many companies rely on things like A/B testing to figure out which workflows and designs work best. But there are some things that are a bit trickier to measure, like exactly which features your users are taking advantage of, and how they’re using them. Mixpanel, a Y Combinator company launching today, is looking to solve this problem by offering companies a suite of analytics tools that go well beyond what tools like Google Analytics measure.
Founder Suhail Doshi says that most significantly large companies, like Slide for example, have entire teams dedicated to tracking user behavior. If you throw a virtual sheep at your friend using one of Slide’s apps, you can be sure that every element of that action — including who the sheep’s receipient was, the time you threw the sheep, and even what prompted you to throw the sheep in the first place — is being tracked.
Unfortunately, most fledgling companies simply don’t have the resources to put together this kind of analytics tracking. Mixpanel solves this problem by giving developers a library of stat tracking functions that they can quickly integrate with their code, saving them the development costs that would have been required to build their own analytics tools. Doshi says this can take as little as ten minutes to integrate, requiring only a line of code wherever there’s something you want to track.
After implementing these functions in their code, companies can track stats from the Mixpanel control panel, which updates in real time. Beyond tracking stats like the number of times a certain song is played or a given feature is used, Mixpanel can also do funnel analysis, which allows startups to measure when in a signup flow users begin to drop off (this allows them to figure out the pain points and lower barriers to entry as much as possible).
Mixpanel’s pricing is based on usage, which it measures by looking at the number of ‘points’ of data the service tracks. The company is already in use by a number of other startups (many of them fellow YC alumni) including Posterous and HeyZap.
Analytics and stat tracking is extremely important to the growth of any company, especially one that’s trying to gain users for the first time. Mixpanel is definitely honing in on a large market — its ultimate success will be decided by how useful the data it collects really is, and in how many datapoints it can track that free services can’t.
We’ve been tinkering with Mixpanel for a few days now. Awesome stuff!
real-time is pretty cool.. I love watching stats increment
We’ve started integrating the mixpanel service with one of out FB apps and it’s very cool! All startups should check out their service.
I’ve met Suhail and the team at Mixpanel, and they are impressively talented and ambitious. This is a great find for YC and I’m excited to see what they cook up next.
Mixpanel let us see what users were doing in real-time during a launch, and was really easy to incorporate into in our js-heavy code.
We have been using Mixpanel for Voxli, and it’s been great. It allows us to get at a bunch of event data much easier than Google Analytics. The team is super responsive to our feedback, often rolling out features the day we asked for them. Recommended!
Really cool concept. This blows google analytics out of the water.
I have to agree with Rich on this one. Bye bye Google analytics.
As soon as I went to the site, for the first time, I looked at the pricing.
First thing they need to do, which their analytics probably can’t tell them to, is tell somebody what the hell a “data point” is when you click the “pricing”.
But I have to say, I’d switch away from Google Analytics for a better service, especially if it’s real time. No doubt.
Even if I’d have to pay.
Google Analytics does something similar to this – event tracking:
http://code.goo...ackerGuide.html
just sayin’.
But it’s not real time.
Just sayin’
Google Analytics has an up-to-3 hour delay
Is GA event tracking open to all yet? It was still limited beta last time I checked, but will try again.
Go Suhail! I knew you would kill it!
They can’t even cough up for an amcharts license?
Way to go MixPanel and Suhail. I’ve known Suhail for quite some time. We are one of their first customers.
What happens if google analytics goes real time?
What happens if Google buys Mixpanel, instead?
Why buy it when they can code it?
Seriously? Have you ever taken a look at Google’s acquisitions? They could have coded any of those things from scratch, but why code it when someone else already has expertise and you can employ them instead?
Application-specific metrics is where it’s at – GA might give you a nice world map and some basic funnel tracking, but that’s not going to help you build a better product. Mixpanel will.
Combine it with what Kampyle are doing with feedback analytics and understand not only what but also why things are happening.
I’m not sure I’d say “Bye bye Google Analytics” just yet. While this does look like an impressive tool, it is geared specifically towards interaction metrics. While that’s certainly an interesting aspect of any site, there is a lot more to analytics than just that, and it doesn’t look like this service does any of that other stuff. I don’t think many people could get by running this as their only stats/analytics package. Probably best to run it alongside something else, such as…. Google Analytics
Can it be used in a flex/flash app?
Great for B2C, but in B2B one needs to segregate residential from corporate visitors to get the correct insight in your funnel. Try LEADSExplorer.
We tried the service a few months back, and they lost us as a customer for the sole reason that they didnt pay for an amcharts.com license for their graphs. Because of this we didn’t feel that they were a serious player in the market and might not be able to handle the necessary load we wanted them to handle. Just a small point guys, but might be worth the investment, it was only 85euros as a one off fee
‘Mixpanel’s pricing is based on usage, which it measures by looking at the number of ‘points’ of data the service tracks.’
How about an idea or an example Jason, TechCrunch?
A typical site might have 10 points… with 1,000 hits a day would be $…
Exactly, offering specific pricing/usage examples is critical for clients to gauge in an instant whether this is useful to them.
oke, i am try
Thanks before
Checking it
Found Mixpanel because of this article and I love the service.
BTW, another problem with Google Analytics is its a hog in various ways. With Mixpanel the code is small, I can easily control how and WHEN it’s loaded, and I can send just the bare minimum information I want to track.
Trying to control how GA worked was painful, especially since I had to wait a day to test any change.
How does this compare to Nuconomy?
Who?
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