once upon a time I thought about making an analytics app.<p>doing the math though, it must be so hard to get traction in this space. it's an expensive / risky business to run (1 hour of downtime will piss off ALL your customers), but at the same time I think on the low end of the pricing scale, demand is going to be very elastic. If you're charging $50 a month for an analytics app, people will always compare you to Google Analytics, and side with the latter since it's free.<p>Getting into the analytics game is only worth it if you know how to sell to enterprise, IMO and you can sign up large organisations for 6-figure license fees. More likely to exit from that kind of scenario, too.<p>That said, I wish Mixpanel and KISSmetrics the best of luck. No doubt they have good products, I just wonder whether the SME market is receptive to boutique analytics apps like these at the kind of scale necessary to make the business viable.