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Comment by Xorlev | Hacker News Reader

Mixpanel helped Mixpanel get their $865M valuation. Mixpanel is solving a huge problem with a bunch of software, gobs of data, and smart people. Beyond that, they're pulling in revenue. Regardless of how good, or how brief your deck is at the end of the day your value comes down to your organization, your ability to execute, and your future revenue potential.

I'm not going to say their deck doesn't have value, but I will say it doesn't seem like it has much of one. Maybe that's the point.

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Step 1) Be successful Step 2) Make enough money that don't you need to ask for money Step 3) Ask for more money anyways!

So yeah, I agree with you. There's nothing special about the pitch deck. The special sauce is the company, duh. They also got a lot of great free marketing out of this blog post. Their next post should be "open sourcing our blog post that helped us get tens of thousands free views". :)

True except 3) is "ask for more money to accelerate growth."

Would it be incorrect to say this was the only slide that mattered from their deck? http://i.imgur.com/4nKuGx1.png

EDIT: Oh, someone already pointed this out downthread a few minutes ago. Whoops.

That definitely is the most important slide. Funding is perhaps similar to college admissions in that the most in need are most likely to be rejected.

I think the KPI slides are very well done. Those look like the questions that VCs would be asking so it's nice to be pro-active.

Love the CIA style redactions. Yes its clear kids, its all about pattern matching. The units and quantities don't really matter.

(NB: Part of me wants to add a tag: /sarcasm. But part of me sees the futility in the gesture, too. Don's flame proof suit.)

I think that slide shows that in B2B software hockey stick growth is not necessary. Good solid growth is enough.

I still am not sure why to choose Mixpanel over their competitors though. I use Flurry and Google Analytics right now, and (as noted in their slides), they are free. What does Mixpanel bring that they don't?

If you say real time, then I'm not sure the 15 minutes it takes GA to add new data is really worth it. I have 20+ million data points a month but the percentage of my profits that Mixpanel would cost for that is crazy.

Also, Parse is now letting you track analytics real time completely for free in unlimited numbers.

Many reasons but the one the our customers value the most: retroactive funnels instead of forward looking funnels which drive people crazy in GA.

Also available in Flurry.

I personally use Clicky Analytics which costs me like $12 a month. Gives me real time tracking, Twitter campaigns and a whole bunch of other stuff in a no nonsense interface that is easy to use. Of course, I don't need detailed analytics nor need to action particular events like sales, etc (because I just track simple apps and blogs). Google Analytics falls into the same category as Clicky and other basic analytic platforms, they show you the views, but don't really let you dig deep and query it.

I've always seen Mixpanel as a mixture between an analytics tool and a data analytics platform. Seeing the number of visitors is one thing, but being able to action specific events and drill down in the data is where a product like Mixpanel really pulls away from the pack. I like how Mixpanel allows you to query your data like you are querying a MySQL database.

A perfect use-case for something like Mixpanel is online media. Say for example you are Youtube. You don't want to just know what videos the most popular or which videos make the most money, you want to know where the people are coming from and what is driving them to consume specific media. If 15% of your revenue is coming from say the top 5 Youtuber's, you want to know how those Youtube channels are getting their traffic, is it subscriber count or something else? You want to ask questions like, "Of the top five Youtube channels, how many of them received their views from Google Plus shares?"

Thanks for the explanation. It doesn't sound like something that would be worth it for my company, but I can at least appreciate the value to some other companies now.

The reason my company chose Mixpanel was their privacy policy. We are privacy-focused, so the idea that providers like Flurry or Google Analytics have access to our customer's data was not something we were comfortable with.

Interesting

I don't know about Parse, but Flurry and GA track on an aggregate basis, not user basis. Mixpanel (or KISSMetrics) are good solutions to track data per user basis and a lot more in-depth tracking. Flurry tracks retention, but it is not very extensive. I don't think GA tracks retention. Mixpanel does a good job of looking at retention metrics and deep dive.

Mixpanel can certainly be a lot better in data visualization/reporting features and pricing.

One of the best messages I got from the How To Start A Startup course was an off-hand line during the funding class: the best thing you can do for your funding chances is have a great product, and Mixpanel seem to nail this, great stuff. As an aside I imagine the headline was crafted to get the post attention, rather than as a reflection of how they feel.

Right there w/ you Xorlev; my thoughts: http://singularity.vc/post/105602600755/mixpanels-toothless-...

In summary "Be Brad Pitt" - great advice if you can figure out how to act on it ;-)

Totally agree. You don't need to pitch hard a good business. I still think the best pitch deck I have ever seen is Mint's: http://pt.slideshare.net/hnshah/mintcom-prelaunch-pitch-deck

FYI that's not Mint's actual pitch deck; it's a deck put together by Berkeley students (myself included) as part of a case competition. Aaron Patzer commented that our deck was prettier than the actual one, but the data was mostly consistent.

They also do an excellent job at customer service. I wish every SaaS made me feel like a valued customer.

To counterpoint, I just got through a presentation for a business line for a large consulting firm. Presentations like this are out of my scope of expertise, so I really appreciated seeing a successful, professionally done version.

Questions:

What is the main font? What is the title font? What software was used?

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