Great writeup here but I have a question on whether Product Analytics is at all appropriate for Startups. I'm incredibly biased (this problem is why I built Chartio), but I think these tools end up being quite bulky, expensive and a non-agile way to do analytics on your product. I feel these products are best suited for later stage companies trying with great tracking detail to improve a funnel or engagement metric, not simply monitor usage.<p>The majority of the important things for a startup are usually already being tracked with timestamps in the database (new signups, new users, churned users, new todo items, etc). If a key metric is not directly tracked, there's usually a good enough proxy available somewhere in the database. A Busineess Intelligence product, or a SQL to chart tool is much more applicable and affordable in the startup stage.<p>There are likely going to be responses here "But what about..." and I'll premptively respond to those with the question: Could that be answered/solved almost just as well with a query to the database, without sacrificing the agility, extra setup and data collection time, and expense overhead? Those are all very costly things for a startup.