https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20037116
Market demand was there but the product wasn't ready for the load yet.
Fast forward two years and now it's all "perfect". The product is now useful — even for people using goaccess or similar. The main reasons include:
1. Understanding of traction and how visitors behave before they convert. You can start optimizing the causes.
2. Faster A/B testing: Volument is an order of magnitude faster than the traditional A/B testing tools.
3. Privacy-friendly. Volument is on the same line with Fathom, Plausible, or Simple Analytics when it comes to privacy.
We've built a custom stack from scratch so this is not just another pretty face to Google Analytics data. We have full control and the door is open for pretty much anything.
The parent post links to a founding story and here's a direct link to the front page:
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1: Bit of myself: I'm a long-term frontend developer: the original author of semi-popular projects like jQuery Tools (2011), Head JS (2013), and Riot JS (2014). I'm also a co-founder of two other successful startups: Flowplayer (flowplayer.com) and Muut (muut.com).
- Solid summary
- Novel solution (omg AIDA in a CRO tool!)
- Clear benefits spelled out vs the competition
- Relatable use cases
- Jumping off points to explore the rest of the product
The product of years spent thinking about the problem I guess! Good stuff :D
How do you get A/B test results faster? New math? Or just more BS? ;)
Another fact is that Volument is a full-blown analytics software it already knows all the data for the baseline variant "A", so you only need to collect data for the "B" variant after a specific timestamp. Further cutting the measurement time by 50%.
More about the topic here:
This is quite a claim to just throw in and not footnote or back up in any way.
Which part of Plausible's source code[1] is doing the tracking, exactly?
Other question I have is, you seem to have returning visitors feature and as far as I understood, you store info in localStorage to be able to do that. I guess you're generating a uniq identifier to be able to that and store in the localStorage. Although it's not a cookie, semantically isn't kinda same thing? If you were to store those in cookies you would have needed to show cookie banner, but since it's in localStorage you don't have to?
We're setting a session identifier to sessionStorage and those id's are wiped out once the session is processed and leaves the server memory. We worked together with a privacy specialist to ensure this is not violating GDPR. Details on what/how we collect data is here:
I am not sure I follow. Why do you still need one in Europe? And besides I think you don't need one with your competitors [0]
[0] https://nts.strzibny.name/privacy-oriented-alternatives-to-g...
I worked in Marketing and community at DigitalOcean over five years as it scaled. I had contributed to a hodge-podge of overlapping analytics tools running in managed chaos at my company, I had watched another team get hoodwinked into a multi-year deal with a big analytics/testing tool that had been in development for months without yielding a single test, I had seen people throughout the company struggle to find answers to basic analytics questions due to the complexity of the tool stack.
I got a Volument pilot going on the public part of our site, and while the scale really strained the Volument infrastructure, I absolutely loved the opinionated and simple interface.
It was like what Netlify did for static-site hosting, applied to analytics. Volument took the 3000 views and features of a legacy provider like GA and just figured out what people actually need and boiled it down to 5.
I've changed companies since, but am excited to test this new version at my current company. The people at Volument are super-great and responsive, and if the new one is anything like the original it's going to be very useful.
[1] https://volument.com/blog/minimalism-the-most-undervalued-de... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21871491
I do A/B testing day in day out. While it has its issues, I think completely dismissing it the way you do on the site makes me question everything else the site claims.
I looked at the live demo and it says about "significance", so I guess you're using a frequentist approach. The sample sizes are to small though, and I think you have SRMs, and it seems like the start and end times for the variants don't match. Also, in ecom it's bad practice to run any test or do much analysis on incomplete periods (eg a pay cycle).
Why aren't you using bayesian stats?
How can I compare test variants? We use monetate or SFCC a/b testing. Can it hook off events like GA can?
But I foresee I will need the kinds of features volument provides in the near future (only some of the conversion focused websites / pages). Might throw it up on one site today to test it out.
Anyway, signed up (which was super easy btw) and here's hoping for some good conversion analytics.
