Show HN: Volument – A new take on website analytics | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Volument – A new take on website analytics

volument.com

88 pointstipiirai45 comments

I wish there was a lower price brackets for smaller side projects / app etc. Something like a "pay-as-you-go" sort of price, as in, 50$ per 10000 views but not capped to a month. I think your approach works a lot with the sort of philosophy from the lean startup etc, but that sort of philosophy encourages to put products to the public with very little user and focus on quality. If I make a side project that brings me 100$ a month, paying 50$ for analytics seems too much. Also, the sort of user that do such side / small projects might end up championing your products in their main job if it's nice.

I can hear you. Volument is indeed built with startups in mind and we're going to start with the current pricing. Let's see what the future holds.

Is the company sustainable at only $50/month?

You're unlikely to learn anything, statistically conclusive, from 10k views -- unless the test is like 100% better than the control, which is very rare in testing.

I would learn how to use the tool. If I like it I might recommend it at work, where $50/month is not a crazy price for a project.

Hey everyone. We built this thing over the past few years after realizing that we could not really understand from traditional analytics how our visitors truly behave and convert. We wanted to measure the AIDA funnel (awareness -> interest -> desire -> action) that all the marketing books and growth essayist talk about, but not truly applied to analytics. We have implemented this together with a couple of customers and it is now ready for the public eye.

Happy to hear your professional feedback.

Thanks!

I would have put a volument solution dashboard applied to the volument website itself somewhere prominent to demo how it works, plus if it's real time enough it would be ultra cool to see change while I browse the website (for example if it floats somewhere ? I'm really bad at UI ^^).

On the current state, I left the website after a short reading session (~3 minutes) and I'm really unsure what is it you're selling exactly !

In short: we're selling analytics that is specifically designed for conversion optimization. Right now you are forced to use a bunch of different tools to get some vague idea whether your website updates were genuinely good or bad.

We see the temptation for real-time analytics and could possibly that for marketing or entertainment purposes. However, the real value in Volument comes from the data that is aggregated from the longer term visitor behavior. How many returned after the first visit? How many re-returned? Which market segments are engaging the most? Who brought the most traction? Believe it or not, the current analytical tools fail to give answers to these basic questions. This is because their internal data model is not designed to answer these questions.

We have tried our best to explain the product in these "Problem" and "Solution" articles:

https://volument.com/learn/problems-in-standard-analytics

https://volument.com/learn/how-volument-works

I read both pages, and I think they do a very good job of explaining the problem part. I don't think they do as good a job of explaining what exactly is the value Volument brings.

As an other commenter pointed, it's not clear whether the images in https://volument.com/learn/how-volument-works are actual screenshots of the product running or just there to clarify the points, and if they are not screens of the product I'm left with no screen of what exactly will be the product.

To me, it does feel a bit like when you're interviewing someone for a position, and they're not able to really separate their own contribution from what their team achieved.

Just my 2 cents though, I wish you the best :-)

We tried our best to explain the value of Volument on the features page:

https://volument.com/features/

The solution page just explains the technical details. We mostly use abstract images when explaining things. The demo works like the product works.

Thank you for the feedback! Definitely valuable and something to take insights from.

Feedback about the online demo, after a very quick visit:

* The UI is a bit confusing, in the sense that it is not directly clear whether the displayed panels are preview of the tool, or documentation about the feature being previewed. * Then, the charts and tables featured in the demo didn't look easy to understand/interpret, neither actionable. The impression I got was that the promised solutions to well described problems are not yet there in the tool.

Positive points:

* nice UI * fast and responsive site * the problem you are describing and focusing on are definitely important pain points for business websites, and it is worth investing time to provide solutions to these

Keep up :)

Thanks! Makes sense.

Seems like a smart approach. We need better analytics tools. Well done

Awesome work you guys been doing past few years! I hit the trial button already!

I think the good ideas that make the product compelling and innovative are hidden too far away from the elevator pitch. Measuring engagement after the page has loaded rather than before is an extremely good one.

This you can do with other solutions but most people don't bother, even if they are SEO experts.

I think some fettling is needed to reach decision makers with a pitch that they can understand assuming goldfish attention spans, then you could be on to a winner.

I actually like that their approach isn't like your typical SaaS website's where there's only buzzwordy elevator pitches and it's impossible to find out what the product is actually about.

Here I take 5 mins, read through "The problem" and "The solution" pages and feel treated like an adult.

I like it too and this site is beautifully created to that effect. I find it inspiring for our site. I only wonder if perhaps it's an approach that speaks more to techies.

I feel particularly good about this response. This has been our exact goal on describing the product. So thank you, "datenhorst".

I agree. Hopefully we find the right message to the right audience. We just launched and we are aware that some trial and error is needed.

I thought I would share my experience signing up for your product in case you find it helpful.

I'm actually shopping right now for a solution for conversion optimization and lead attribution for our website (www.facetdev.com). I read almost every page of your site, but it was still not clear how your product works and what it does. I signed up anyway to give it a shot.

Sign up experience went smooth. After I completed the sign up process, and installed the snippet, I ended up on the Team page. I wasn't sure where to go next. I clicked on Traction and it took me to some demo website date for Acme. I tried to use the team drop down to pick my website, but it wasn't listed there. I tried for 5 minutes to find my website, refreshed the page, clicked other links, etc.

The 7th or 8th time I clicked Traction it took me to a blank page. Then a page with two empty sections that say Not Enough Data. It still says that now. I'm not sure what I'm supposed to see in these sections. I don't know what "Market traction" means.

I couldn't really tell how the product worked before signing up and I'm more confused now. Rather than telling me "Not enough data", maybe tell me what I should expect to see here and when? The behavior page is also presented without explanation. The "Changes in Behavior" panel has some stats at the top that don't make sense to me.

My feedback is that you are introducing too many new concepts for me - terminology is new, data visualizations are new, app layout is unusual, the settings tab/flyout on the right is unusual, and the app is blended with your marketing website.

If your product does what I think it should do, the pricing is good, maybe a little low.

Hopefully this is helpful!

Thank you for the feedback! We take these points seriously since they are critical. Especially the issues on the onboarding flow. The main problem currently is that the product leaves you in rather confusing state after installing the embed code. We will fix that next.

Your other points are also valid and will be addressed. I really like Hacker News — hard to get this valuable feedback elsewhere.

Thank you "rsweeney"!

Looks cool! Love the focus on "goal/conversion optimization". Would you be interested in building an integration w/ Segment? We can highlight you in our Catalog, this way 19,000+ Segment customers can discover and try your tool with just one click. Let me know, I'm at sudheendra [@] segment.com

We certainly are. We will first cover all the issues mentioned on this thread. We want to focus on building a solid, reliable software instead of acquiring tons of people.

Thanks for the opportunity!

Seems a bit expensive to me. How do you justify the high prices compared to other analytics tools?

We hear mixed voices. Most people seem to think $50/month is cheap for a small- and medium-sized company (with lower volumes).

For bigger sites Volument is indeed more expensive than Mixpanel for example, but we justify that with providing data that helps them do more of those valuable conversions.

And Heap Analytics is much more expensive for bigger sites than Volument.

I have some side-projects that have a few pageviews a day and make a few dollars a month. They would be a perfect way for me to try out your service and keep it in mind for larger projects or work, but I don't want to spend $50 when that's many times my monthly revenue.

Maybe it would be a good idea to have a free tier for something like 1000 pageviews per month? Just an idea.

I second this. I'd love to try it out on some low-volume side projects before recommending it to some of the larger sites I work on.

We'll keep this in mind. A promise.

Because anyone who thinks $50/month is too expensive isn't the kind of customer you want to waste time acquiring or building a product for. It's a filter function.

The design is wonderful, I love it.

I'm getting an error when I attempt to "set up". I don't see anything until I open the JS console:

"/api/validations:1 Failed to load resource: the server responded with a status of 500 ()"

It looks very compelling!

This is now fixed. Thank you for reporting this critical bug!

I've seen a sneak peek before and learned that things evolve pretty quickly at this point :) Cannot wait to see where all this goes, congratz on the release!

Love the product concept and the problem / solution descriptions. I am not your typical customer though as I was already aware of the limitations of existing solutions.

I just signed up for this and set it up in our website. I have a couple of questions: - Is the analytics realtime or does it take time to process events? - Is there minimum data threshold that is needed before anything shows up in the dashboard?

Currently the views are generated once per hour. Everything in Volument is based on aggregation, ie we look how much "traction" is generated in the first 1, 3, 7, 14, or 30 days (based on your ability to retain visitors). All that important information is not real-time.

We see the importance of real-time tracking on the initial onboarding phase so that it's easier to debug things and see the potential setup errors.

We're just getting started so not everything in place yet.

Thank you!

Nice design and looks promising! greetings from Finland!

We definetly need analytics toools like volument.com! Great job and what a design! Keep up the good work

One important point that I don't see anywhere on the website is if to use this service do I need to add a GDPR banner? Does it use personal user data (like an identifiable number for each user) ?

Because if it does, I need to add a GDPR banner and opt-in mechanism, which I don't want. It is possible to do funnel analytics without using PII, and I'd like to know if Volument allows that (without their Tracking conversions feature obviously).

This is an important point and needs to be addressed on our site. Volument client stores an unique client id to localStorage, and I'm _pretty sure_ GDPR banner is needed for that. We're investigate and extend this document about the topic:

https://volument.com/learn/user-privacy

Thanks for pointing this out.

FYI on that page the text is too thin, it is hard to read. Removing the font-weight: 100 CSS rule fixes it.

Crap.. Which page and what browser? Thanks!

https://volument.com/learn/user-privacy on Firefox

Looks like an interesting new product. I will test it out!

pedantic note: shouldn't "No analytics is like Volument" be "No analytics are like Volument." ?

Perhaps not, according to Wikipedia anyway.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analytics

Reply on news.ycombinator.com