An idea a day - Remotely hosted Analytics solution

This is an article in the Five Startup Ideas series at the 42topics blog. In his essay, Ideas for Startups, Paul Graham argues that ideas are not a critical factor for success of startups. Although I do not believe that ideas are worthless, as many people do, I believe that they are not any where near as important as execution. So to prove my point, I am giving away 5 startup ideas in next five days. All of them describe a problem, its solution, the technology involved, the competition and market size. If you are not a hacker, and want to build any of these things may I suggest Uswaretech.

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Title:

Remotely hosted Analytics solution.

The problem:

For most commercial websites tracking results, about their visitors, about the sites which link to them, about which users convert to sales/leads is a big problem. Google Analytics is the default solution for doing this. In truth Google Analytics is an absolutely marvelous piece of software. Yet there are a few problems with this.

For most webmasters, giving information to Google about their sites is a issue. If you install Google Analytics on your site, what you know about your site, Google know too. Your best performing Adwords keywords, conversion ration and most anything. This is a situation in which many webmasters would not like to be in, but as Google Analytics as the best analytics software, most webmasters choose this.

The solution:

Create a remotely hosted analytics software. Do not think much, just STEAL all the features from analytics. If you want to go beyond Analytics, you may try providing services provided by Crazyegg, but I think that would be a case of featuritis. Provide ironclad guarantees in your SLA, that this data will never be provided to any third party.

Technologies involved:

A server side technology to collect and make meaning of data. Javascript code to capture the visitors information.

Existing Competition:

There are a lot of people who are trying to do this. Mint and Clicky are doing this. Of them Mint is a self hosted solution which means that the users need to install on their server, which is hassle many people do not want to get through. Clicky is a remotely hosted software but this is not comparable to the level of detail provided by Google Analytics.

Market Size:

Google bought Urchin in 2005. The exact terms of Google’s Analytics purchase were not disclosed, but were expected to be in ballpark of 30 Millions.

Others:

The big issue here is gaining webmasters trust, that you would never share their data with any third party.

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This was part 3 of the series of 5 startup ideas. For next five days we will publish a new idea a day. If you want to read all of them, please subscribe. Oh and have you seen the 42topics startup section? Or if you want you can create your own topic.