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Comment by jamiequint | Hacker News Reader

I'm interested in why you found Mixpanel hard to use. It satisfies every requirement you have described out of the box and only takes minutes to set up. Unless you wanted to process a ton of past data it probably would have been easier for you to skip all the manual data entry excel requires.

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I haven't used Mixpanel, only Kissmetrics. I wanted to run the analysis on all of our data and while that's doable in Kissmetrics, Excel is faster (desktop vs latency of web app requests), more flexible (I can do what I want vs being limited to what KM lets me do), and likely easier to get data in (import CSV vs ...?)

I had the exact same problem as you, so I'm writing http://www.instahero.com. It will offer everything kissmetrics etc offer, but will give you the ability to easily program your own reports, without having to download your data or anything like that.

Think of it like kissmetrics having an "edit the code that generates this report" option. You can leave your email or drop me a line if you want to try out the beta.

I would strongly suggest you drop the "websites not using us yet" line from your landing page. Showing their logos isn't a trick to increase conversions, but borderline dodgy -- and people will notice.

Ah, sorry, that was just a joke, the logos came with the theme. I'll remove them asap, thanks.

Cool, makes sense given you were working with a bunch of past data. Going forward I would recommend you try out Mixpanel though, it's much more flexible than KISSmetrics Mixpanel actually does a lot of stuff that makes it easier than excel for stuff like cohort analyses, it'spaiute flexible.

I'll take a harder look at MP - I'm all about ease of use. One of the other reasons Excel is nice is that your present self doesn't have to anticipate future data analysis needs. i.e. there was data I pulled into the analysis that I never would have set up MP or KM to track beforehand. At query-writing time I thought it might be interesting to pull in and see if there was any kind of pattern.

You can import data into Mixpanel any time you want: https://mixpanel.com/docs/api-documentation/importing-events...

Kareem,

What were you trying to measure in KISSmetrics that you were unable to? Did you try using the Data Export feature? http://support.kissmetrics.com/apis/data/data-export-setup

Btw- You can import data into KISSmetrics as well: http://support.kissmetrics.com/advanced/importing_data

I'm the Product Manager at KISSmetrics, so I'm genuinely interested in your issues to understand what you're struggling with. We try to cover key use cases like cohort reporting, but perhaps missed something for you.

Thanks, Jason

The advantages of using Excel over a 3rd party service:

- since all the relevant data's in our db, i don't need to import data into a 3rd party service if i haven't been tracking it. i just modify my sql query. no need to futz with data importing, syncing, yada yada. - using Excel is a matter of writing sql, running the query, then importing a CSV. simple. - data manipulation is easier - Excel is designed for it.

I wrote the SQL and ran the analysis in my post over a couple of hours one afternoon. I can't imagine it being easier using any 3rd party service.

If you want to email more, drop me a line - email's in my profile.

Perhaps the OP didn't feel like learning new software when he had a mental model of how to do what was needed using familiar tools?

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