Show HN: Volument 1.0 – A smarter take on website analytics
volument.com
volument.com
We released our MVP here in Hacker News exactly two years ago with this post:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116
There was definite market demand, but unfortunately, the product wasn't quite ready for the load yet.
Fast forward two years. Now we've perfected the product with real users and it's now genuinely useful for them — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include:
1. Traction: Volument monitors visitors' viewport consumption on the frontend to reveal things like whether you are making a good first impression (stayed 3s or more) or if they are interested in the content (focused 1 minute or more). The metrics go up with great design choices and down with the bad ones (like fullscreen sales/consent dialogs). Eventually turning your website into something people enjoy using.
2. Faster A/B testing: Volument is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional A/B testing tools. It reaches statistical significance sooner by utilizing the huge mass of leading indicators (like the first impression) at the top of the conversion funnel. For every conversion event, there are thousands of leading events to learn from.
3. Privacy-friendly. Just like Fathom, Plausible, or Simple Analytics, Volument is part of the "privacy-first movement so no cookie banner is needed (outside Europe). We predict that all future analytics services are privacy-friendly.
We've built a custom stack from scratch so Volument is not just another pretty face for Google Analytics data. We have full control and the door is open for pretty much anything. That's why we are eager to hear your thoughts, particularly on analytics. What would be your "dream tool"?
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1: A little bit of myself: I'm a long-term frontend developer: the original author of semi-popular projects like jQuery Tools (2011), Head JS (2013), and Riot JS (2014). I'm also a co-founder of two other successful startups: Flowplayer (flowplayer.com) and Muut (muut.com).
ps. Button tests are ...
Why did it take so long to build?
1. The data from big customers was something we didn't expect. Tens of thousands of blog entries and referring domains. Measuring tractino for all of them was a no-go. It's was a usability problem (and a scalability prlbem for us).
2. We had to make a pivot. The first version wasn't as exciting as we wanted it to be. This one is, at least according to the user feedback.
3. This was mostly done as a side project. Only the past six months have been two people full time.