Ask YC: Review Trendly, new analytics app from the folks behind Dabble DB | Hacker News Reader

Ask YC: Review Trendly, new analytics app from the folks behind Dabble DB

trendly.com

50 pointsavibryant26 comments

So here's the thing: I'm not going to give you my Google Analytics until you show me a compelling reason to. "We track Google Analytics" doesn't mean anything to me, an intrigued audience, yet skeptical of and resistant to just installing shit willy-nilly.

Install it on the company blog or something.

Agreed that the front page is light on info/screenshots etc. Did you click the "how it works" link?

You may want to include a link to the "how it works" section from http://trendly.com/preview/.

When I went to the site, I clicked "try it now" before I read to the bottom of the page, and once I got there, I didn't want to sign in. Maybe say something like "Not ready yet? See how it works" or something like that.

Agreed. Will do.

Done.

The about page might be useful for you:

http://trendly.com/about/

Agree; I'd rather see it in action on a dummy/demo site first.

GA is the keys to the kingdom for an online business...conversions, cash flow, ad sense, ad words...it is all there. You'll also need to offer a very clear and compelling value-add over Google Analytics for a serious person to even consider it. Heck, I don't even use 1/2 of the stuff GA gives me-- why do I need another service? You've got to answer that question.

You should also charge money for the service....I'd actually feel more comfortable about using it.

Also, the site lacks basic things like a location address, privacy policy, an obvious About Us page, and a TOS that protects my data.

Any chance of getting a demo like Dabble's?

I assume you did this one in Seaside as well? Every time I see a project you've done it makes me want to fire up a Smalltalk image and try it out again.

We prototyped it in Seaside, but the end product is actually Seaside-free. We do use some Smalltalk though.

Yeah, I'll do a screencast at some point, but it's way too much effort to do that until we've finalized the UI - and we want feedback from y'all first :)

This project has nontrivial pieces written in Squeak, Java, Ruby, and Javascript. The site has a dash of PHP.

Care to share the rationale behind those choices? Sounds interesting.

Sure, in brief: Smalltalk because we're most productive in it, Java for some code that particularly needed to be performant, and Ruby because it's better than the other two at interacting with the OS/tying all the pieces together. Obv JS for client-side whiz-bang.

The mid-page sparklines are surprisingly informative.

Simple request: Would love to be able to click on referring domains to visit their websites.

It appears I'm more trusting of my Analytics data than most (could be because my site garners little traffic). The copy on the front page was clear enough for me to warrant a trial, and I felt that I knew what to expect from the very beginning.

I found the sign in process quick and painless--sign into Gmail, agree to grant access, and now sit anxiously awaiting my email of data. The "how it works" section that I was shown directly afterwards was also very clear. As I read the content and followed along with the screenshots, it all just made perfect sense. All in all, great job!

Your homepage is really confusing to me. The first thing I find is a logo which is a link... to the page I'm on. That's useless and confusing. Next the "Try Trendly Now" bar, which looks more like some kind of horizontal-rule style header than it does a link. Then there's a tiny "How it works" link that sorta looks like a header too, considering there is a paragraph of text below it (which is the same size as the link, and it's just some "about" copy!)

You should make better use of modifiers which produce contrast and a hierarchy of importance, such as text size and color. I imagine this isn't your final homepage, but having it start off more intuitive couldn't hurt :)

I want an analytics system that I can give different style sheets to, it will apply them like in AB testing automatically, and show me the performance results.

Google analytics is good enough for collecting data but how do you help us implement the data?

Small thing about the UI: as large as the "Try Trendly Now" button is on the main page, it didn't really occur as a button to me until I happened to mouse over it. Maybe I'm just not used to a link looking like that.

It's taken more than 2 hours to get my results - I'd love to get an email saying "After looking at your data, it looks like it's going to take N more hours to finish the results".

Yeah, that would be good. The main bottleneck is in sucking all the data down from Google's API - for a site with as much traffic as justin.tv, that can indeed take hours. Once that's done the processing itself is relatively quick. But that's certainly something we could notice and let you know about. (Consider this your notification for now...)

After reviewing some of the comments, I've made the "Try Trendly Now" link a bit more "clicky".

Nice thing! But you have problems with unicode text (for example, with cyrillic).

looks good from the screenshots! Have tried to approximate this with visualization etc but that never worked well enough. have submitted my analytics. Waiting for the result.

What about pricing when out of beta ?

Thanks.. you should be getting your results pretty quick (longer if you have a high-traffic site). Pricing is still an open question. We're talking about $5/month intro pricing for now, but presumably it will eventually be based on the traffic volume of the site/amount of data we're processing.

Looks cool. Should have clear privacy policy given the sensitive business information that's being collected.

A hint of pricing would be nice, too, though I can understand you may just be in the collecting-feedback, sending-feelers stage.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com