KISSmetrics Makes Its First Acquisition — Open Source Startup SourceNinja
Analytics company KISSMetrics has acquired SourceNinja, a startup offering to help companies manage security flaws in their open source libraries.
KISSmetrics co-founder and head of product Hiten Shah made it sound like a pretty standard talent acquisition. Shah’s company won’t be using the Source Ninja technology, but it’s bringing on the startup’s two founders (and only team members) on-board — Brett Hardin will become a senior web application engineer and Matt Stump will become an infrastructure engineer.
The SourceNinja team was incubated at AngelPad, and that’s where Shah said he and his co-founder Neil Patel met them.
“The SourceNinja team contacted us for a potential partnership and were exciting about utilizing their technology within the KISSmetrics product,” Shah said (via email). “After a few conversations we decided it would make more sense to acquire them instead of just licensing the technology. … That technology can’t directly plugin to KISSmetrics, but, the experience Matt and Brett have gained from building the technology directly helps our use cases.”
The financial terms of the deal aren’t being disclosed. Shah said this is the company’s first acquisition.
Read more from the original source: KISSmetrics Makes Its First Acquisition — Open Source Startup SourceNinja
M:Metrics Co-Founder Will Hodgman Joins KISSmetrics As CEO
Analytics company KISSmetrics has hired a new CEO — Will Hodgman (pictured), who co-founded mobile analytics data startup M:Metrics.
Hodgman and Hiten Shah, the company’s co-founder and previous CEO, met with me last week to explain the move. Hodgman is leaving an executive vice president role at comScore, which acquired M:Metrics in 2008. Since then he’s been building out the company’s presence in Asia. (His M:Metrics co-founder Seamus McAteer recently launched a mobile ad startup called Metaresolver.) He joined the KISSmetrics board in 2010, presumably due to his experience in the analytics field.
It’s time for the company to “transition R&D and product focus to a sales focus,” Hodgman said — even within the past few months, KISSmetrics has been growing dramatically, and it now has 1,300 paying customers, including some large companies in the Fortune 500 and 100. And while it faces plenty of competition, Hodgman argued that KISSMetrics is “developing a new space, or I should say evolving an old one,” specifically by delivering data that’s focused on people, not devices or cookies.
“We’ve all moved beyond what people refer to as Web 2.0, in terms of services being delivered on the web,” he said. “From an analytics, customer intelligence standpoint, things have not evolved at the same pace.”
Shah is staying on as the head of the product team, while his co-founder Neil Patel will continue to serve as vice president of marketing. Shah said he’s happy to be spending more time on product, especially since Hodgman has more experience with sales and scaling a company.
One area that Shah wants to focus on is mobile (an area that Hodgman certainly has experience with). There are several companies offering mobile analytics products, including KISSmetrics, but Shah said, “We don’t think anyone’s doing it right,” though he isn’t ready yet to talk too specifically about his mobile plans. He added that he wants to offer more segmentation in KISSMetrics data and introduce more features to make the data actionable.
Read the original post: M:Metrics Co-Founder Will Hodgman Joins KISSmetrics As CEO
KISSmetrics Launches Power Reports — A Friendly Interface For Asking Data-Heavy Questions
Analytics company KISSmetrics has launched a new feature that should make it easier for customers to answer complicated questions that usually require lots of database queries and technical implementation.
Large companies usually have huge stores of customer data, but in order to create comprehensible reports from that data, KISSMetrics says enterprises hire a team of technical consultants or devote lots of their technical team’s time to “enormous SQL queries and manual data pulls.” The Power Report, on the other hand, requires zero setup and presents a non-technical interface for identifying the data that you need.
As one example, KISSmetrics said a SaaS company launching new marketing channels could create a Power Report analyzing the new users and providing information like monthly customer signups, what channel they used to sign up, the amount each customer paid per month, and more. Or a media company that A/B tests multiple landing pages over the course of a year could create a report showing their entire history of tests, along with relevant data for each page like number of comments, number of visitors, engagement, and revenue.
And as you can see in the screenshot above, the reports can be highly customizable without requiring any complicated database queries. Companies use drop-down menus to identify which metrics they’re interested in and which visitor groups they want to compare.
Although the company is officially launching the feature now, it has already been quietly offering Power Reports as part of its enterprise pricing plans. Co-founder Hiten Shah said the feature has attracted a positive response from both larger companies and small startups that are glad they don’t have to “spend energy and time and waste our engineers’ time” creating these reports on their own.
You can read more about the new Power Reports in this PDF.
Go here to see the original: KISSmetrics Launches Power Reports — A Friendly Interface For Asking Data-Heavy Questions