Show IH: A hotjar alternative from a fellow indie hacker
Even though I'm on here all the time - voting, commenting and posting - for some reason I didn't post on IH about our product launch a few weeks back, so I thought it was about time! Especially as I think it could be a really helpful tool for everyone 😊
Together with @lemonjs I've been building Squeaky, which is a product analytics suite that includes analytics, session recording, customer feedback tools, heatmaps and user journey mapping (we're also introducing events monitoring and funnels in the next 1-2 months).
We're aware there are plenty of players in this space, both established and new, but we're not concerned about that as there's a lot of disruption in the analytics market at the moment because of changes to legislation etc. So, plenty of opportunities, and we think we have something interesting to offer!
How we're different to the established players:
We've built a tool that doesn't use cookies or IP tracking, and you can easily mask any personal data client-side if you want to use session recording in a privacy-friendly manner. We're also deliberately not pricing-out early stage startups and small businesses, we want to make sure that everyone can benefit from the value of good product analytics, regardless of their budget.
How we're different to the new players:
There's loads of awesome privacy-friendly analytics tools 😍 but they tend to focus on basic analytics dashboards. We do offer those, but we're looking to offer a considerably broader array of features and functionality - essentially the first really comprehensive product analytics toolbox that still lets you respect user privacy.
Our current status
We only made the tool publicly available in April after an extended beta period, but so far:
- We've captured around 1,000,000 session recordings and over 500,000,000 events
- We have around 65 companies using our app, on about 110 sites (some companies will install Squeaky on their website and their web app)
- Most are still on the free plan, though MRR is around $300 which is exciting!
Anyway, if anybody wants to take a look we'd love your feedback, and happy to provide a 1-on-1 demo to any fellow indiehackers too...even if you're just feeling nosey and like looking at other products haha.
Love seeing more competition in this space. I built Zenovay with a similar mindset — session replay and heatmaps should be part of your analytics, not a separate $40/mo tool. The difference is Zenovay also includes traffic analytics, AI insights, conversion funnels, and uptime monitoring. One dashboard instead of three subscriptions.
We are one of the first 5 users of Squeaky and I'm super impressed by what Chris and Lewis have built. They respond quickly to feedback and the features I need like screen recording is on par with Hotjar and Full Story.
Highly recommend using this product if you are trying to better understand how users interact with your product.
Chris, this is one of the best looking products on IndieHackers I have seen. Congratulations on your success. It's not easy technically, and it's an impressive build.
Thanks Ryan, nice to hear you like it 😊 We thought we had to really push the brand and website as we were entering such an established market.
We actually decided to hand roll the website because we felt a CMS would only slow it down in the end (build-wise and performance) or force us to compromise in areas we didn't want to. We've built our own micro CMS for the blog though which is pretty cool actually!
We're planning to record some demo videos for the site, honestly just a bit embarrassed by my own voice on video 😂 Or do you mean you'd be interested in a 1-on-1 demo?
Thanks for sharing. Looking forward to seeing the demo videos. Don't be embarrassed by your voice. You have a great product to showcase.