User Analytics as Your Product Grows

airpair.com

24 points·rywalker··8 comments

Serious, analytics is a sensitive topic for me, because I've invested weeks into these tools and many of them have not grown as we've become more intelligent. I'm totally jaded from the Mixpanel API and partially jaded from Segment.io too... I feel like most folks who take their data serious go for their own solutions.

Totally agree - here's a quote from our YC Application Summary that we're submitting today...

"Mid-stage product owners that rely on all-in-one user user analytics platforms eventually outgrow the simplicity of those tools. Many choose to build their own user events datawarehouse at this point."

Sounds like I'm describing you personally ;)

glad i pasted this here, found a typo :)

"We find quite often, however, that your historical data is incompatible with the schema that you want to use going forward."

Can you go into this more? What schema do you find companies are using at scale and how is this different from their initial setup?

Once you learn about Snowplow's canonical event model (https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow/wiki/Canonical-event-mo...) or read Keen's data modeling guide (https://keen.io/docs/event-data-modeling/event-data-intro/) you quickly realize all the stuff that you haven't been recording :)

Thanks for posting this Ry. It's just making me realize how much more work I have to do to back up any claim about being "data-driven".

You and me both :) Ironically, even analytics companies can have cobbler's shoes syndrome. Good analytics is a journey, not a destination.

As the CTO of an eCommerce start up, this type of data is extremely important. Thanks for sharing your post!

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