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Comment by brianchu | Hacker News Reader

From what I can gather, it's like any other analytics service, except:

1) You have to do all data analysis and visualization by yourself. 2) There are basic data analysis components built in (exposed through their API). 3) You can build (and embed in a website) your own analytics dashboard with custom visualizations from a JavaScript SDK.

Something like Mixpanel will do all the data analysis and visualization for you, and won't let you do any custom analysis or visualization (aside from exporting your data).

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Exactly.

We're operating at a layer below other analytics products, and we're certainly not as useful out of the box. A good analogy might be:

MailChimp : SendGrid :: Google Analytics : Keen IO

Which is to say, Keen IO is a set of developer API's wrapping hosted infrastructure, whereas other analytics products are end-to-end solutions. We're an agnostic event data backend, and they are each a full product offering with its own focus.

Hopefully that helps explain why we don't think of ourselves as competitors to products like Mixpanel or GA or KISSmetrics -- in fact we plan to build one-click import and export connectors from/to those services and others. We think our position in the ecosystem will actually help them retain customers who would otherwise churn in favor of building in-house.

We actually do this: https://mixpanel.com/docs/api-documentation/displaying-mixpa... - though, not widely known.

In fact, Olark.com's analytics graphs are powered by us right now for their customers.

I think our target markets are different.

Our API is the only product we have, and thus it's the only way we can make money. We think that, over time, that will incentivize us to make the best API possible.

We really admire your product, especially the new Engage stuff, which helps app marketers close the loop between intelligence & personal action in a way that the market hasn't seen before (we'd even like to be customers, once our export-to-Mixpanel feature is done!).

As I mentioned before, we see ourselves as the SendGrid to your Mailchimp. Both play a valuable role and have different use cases.

The embeddable metrics/charts look very cool and sound easy to use! This is one of the features currently missing in google analytics/mixpanel (Yes, you can use full mixpanel's data API but why not just a few lines of JS codes?)

It sounds a bit like http://www.instahero.com (which I'm building), but without the display stuff?

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