Simon Sinek's 'Start with Why' speech always resonated with me.
For me, my purpose in life is to help others, and my own personal super-power is software design. So, my 'why' is to help you, in any way I can, with the power of software.
Why create another analytics solution?
Analytics is a funny business.
Google purchased 'Urchin' and rebranded it as Google Analytics, and for a while, Google Analytics 3 was the de-facto analytics platform, running on more than three-quarters of websites.
Google Analytics 3 was good, but it was never great, rarely received meaningful product updates, and it never had 'obvious' integrations like with payment processors etc. Part of the reason for this was that GA3, being free, was designed only to help Google, and as with all things 'free', you and your users are the product.
GA3 being free prevented any new entrants from joining the market, and so a lot of products that should have been features of an analytics solution (such as product analytics, subscription analytics, behavioural heatmaps etc) ended up being built as separate companies.
And then there was 4
With the introduction of GDPR/CCPA, Google's ad business started to get squeezed.
Google Analytics was fundamentally incompatible with these privacy-centric frameworks, and had to be re-architected, and Google introduced Google Analytics 4.
GA4 is a very different product to GA3. In many ways, it fixes GA3's shortcomings, but, the user interface is half-baked, and it's challenging to get simple insights out from it.
Even getting a list of the top 100 pages on your website is difficult.
I was busy running an online publishing business and another software startup, all the while using GA3, and then GA4.
I have a lot experience, and even I found GA4 to be unusable. For a developer, it might be workable, but for anyone else, it was a non-starter.
I waited patiently, with open wallet, for a startup to come and take its place, but none ventured.
Some incredible entrants, like Fathom Analytics and Plausible joined the market, and both offer outstanding products, but their pitch is 'simple' analytics.
They're right about that, there's a bunch of demand for that, but marketers often need more incisive insights than just page views.
Start with why
That's where Glass comes in. The 'why' is this- to build the analytics service that GA3 should have been; with heat maps, session replays, integration with Stripe, team collaboration features and more.
We'll try to charge a fair price for it, where the benefits of your data accrue to you, not to Google, and hope you'll find it helpful.
