idea validation: Analytics for your SaaS customers
Any feedback on the following idea is appreciated:
If you run a SaaS, most likely that you'd like to provide your users some statistics about their usage of the product.
For instance, let's say you have email marketing product, you'd like to show your customers statistics of how many emails were sent, opened, clicked, etc.
I'd like to provide a platform that allows you to send all kind of timestamped-events from your service with dimensions and measurements.
dimensions allow you to query/filter/sort/group and measurements are numbers that you can apply any aggregate function on like count, min, max, mean, avg, etc.
This will allow you to provide in-app dashboard to your customers with their data, send weekly summary emails, etc.
The service is first of all an API to log events and then retrieve them.
On top there could be embeddable dashboards you can provide to your customers.
Would you find this useful?
What are the mandatory features to make this useful for you?
I think this is definitely worth pursuing and I think a solid niche to look into is no-code.
Adding great visualizations and dimensions can be difficult or impossible on a Nocode platform and this would solve it all.
Would love to see what you come up with.
I spent 6 months pursuing an analytics platform. My idea was to allow data in any shape or form and the platform would be able to figure out a chart from it.
When working with this I had people willing to try it that seemed to have an actual usecase. After 3 months of building - nothing. Classical case of "yes, but no".
If you're going to continue with this the only way to keep your sanity is to not write a single line of code. Only marketing and sales. If you're able to get people to pay (either money or commitment) then code, but not before.
When working on this thing I was surprised every week on how many competitors there actually are. They only surface in time, Google does not show them. In fact - there are so many that they fold on a regular basis and nobody notices. Like mine did.
Btw the "high price tag" that some products have are there for a reason. For an analytics product to be useful (and this is still not going to give you a single sale) the amount of features people expect these days is insane. To launch with few features means you've got to nail a huge problem. From your description I would say you're not aware of specific problems, but rather came to a cool idea you want to build.
I'm happy I did the project just to have something in the portfolio (new language), but I hope I'm saving you time with this pessimistic speech.
Start with an audience, get subscribes, then figure out what they need. I can advise Amy Hoy's 30x500.
Hi, thanks for the honest feedback.
Can you share what your product was exactly?
Sometimes small nuances in the message can make a huge difference.
Analytics platform is something that I would expect to give me insights, and like you mentioned, people probably expect a lot from because there are mature and free platforms that are setting the baseline for everyone else.
A platform that allows you to build dashboards for your customers, on the other hand, is something that I haven't seen too much of.
I will definitely start with getting an audience and validation before I build anything.
Thanks for the advice!
the website is down now, but it's open source, so: https://gitlab.com/bashboard/bashboard-backend may be of some help.
actually there are many that specialize in this. I don't remember the names anymore, but I promise you they exist and they're good. Also - generating reports is a huge thing that most big providers do.
Thanks 👍
Hey @Danbars, great idea there and I foresee many people would agree it would be something they need.
I think you should go ahead with more validation; start asking people for money. Many users would tell you this would be something they would use but that doesn't mean it would be a service they would take money out of their wallet to pay for.
You can do this without much costs, just follow what Justin Mares did : set up a landing page with a checkout process and $50 on bing ads to validate his bone broth business.
I got more examples on GrowthHunt.co if you are interested on validating your idea.
Cheers and all the best!
I would use such a service and others in my company as well. Have you done market research about existing solutions?
There are some products like keen.io with a very high price tag.
Datawaves had this, but they are now pivoting and closing this service.
I couldn't find any platform that has this with a reasonable pricetag, which is how I came to the need. In all the projects that I did I always had the need but never found anything reasonable.
I'm starting a similar project but focused on mobile apps. Initially will be for capturing feedbacks from apps but this types of analytics for Events are common in mobile platforms so we should have some similar use case.
@Alialeidmax I saw that you recently looked for something.
Does this idea resonates with you?