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Ask HN: How to build the internal analytics for a SaaS startup?

4 points by shaohua ↗ HN
Currently working in a startup with zero analytics besides Google Analytics. Want to build a lot of more. Where to start? I know some tools such as analytics.js / Mixpanel but what should the analytics strategy be?

4 comments

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davismwfl
Are you asking which tools to use or what to measure? Strategy to me is what to measure, although there is some technical strategy on how to measure and display the data so it isn't overwhelming and useless.

First, measure most everything at the day, week, month and yearly level, then do week over week, month over month and year over year comparisons. Usually this means we store the most granular level and then rollup from there.

What to measure depends on what you are doing, but IMO these are some general things you should always measure: signups, cancels, time on site, time from signup to first use, A/B tests of course on features, pricing etc. This is in addition to the normal reliability, server metrics etc. I recently setup our sites to start tracking peoples first visit until signup, of course this isn't foolproof as it relies on a cookie, but I think it will help us over time.

The key to the analytics/metrics is you want to be able to cross section them and be able to look at when you add a new feature, or remove something etc.

Frankly, besides storing normal metrics, we store every API call, the time it takes, who made it, which machines were involved etc. This lets us basically look at everything that happens. From that I can get signups, cancellations, engagement statistics and a whole host of other things, this solves most of the business questions and almost all operational concerns like machines being whacked.

Not saying my ideas are 100% right or even correct in all circumstances, but thought I'd at least share.

davismwfl
Also, just for a little more detail.

From the business you need to measure profitability, cash, revenue, customer acquisition cost, supply chain (where the customer came from), customer value, life time customer value, time to cover CAC etc. Not sure where you are at with those.

Even in these broad categories there are lots of details. For example on revenue, IMO you should measure it against head count, as well measure profitability against # of employees etc. When you are bootstrapped or working on the smallest possible budget, this will also help you know when you can/should add more staff etc.

shaohua
thanks a lot. This is a good starting point. Any external tool or lib that you recommend?
davismwfl
Not really a specific tool. We write all our analytics out and then do some rollups in the database and use Highcharts to display them on the website. Not super fancy, but effective. For our setup its more about the process to rollup the data than a specific toolset. We wrote all our own metrics and tracking using a middleware concept with Express in node.js. That's probably not totally relevant to your use case.

Hopefully that helps a little. Let me know if I can help you any more, happy to share whatever I can.