Data Analytics for the Mobile Web

When I first met Suhail Doshi, the CEO of Mixpanel, I was blown away by his passion, focus and vision for his company.  Here was a twenty-something, technical founder who articulated the perfect vision for collecting and analyzing user behavior on mobile devices.  Not only did he have vision, but Mixpanel was already collecting 4 billion actions every month and generating revenue from a wide-array of companies. (An “action” is a user-generated event that occurs when the user engages with a mobile app.) In fact, Mixpanel is on track to reach 7 billion actions by the end of May! Their solution was so differentiated and so perfect the customer base was built all by word-of-mouth.  No marketing and no sales.  Simply amazing.

It’s all about the data

Mobile applications are driving the new world of computing.  Nearly a million mobile apps have been developed in the past few years for iPhone, iPad and Android devices (TechNet).  This trend will continue—perhaps even accelerate—and the companies that make these applications are becoming acutely aware of the need to analyze user behavior and traction.  Knowing who is using an app for how long and which features are more used than others has a profound impact on how the application should be developed and deployed.  Providing a dedicated solution to this problem is exactly what Mixpanel does.  Until now, the best that mobile application developers could do was use older PC-based technology, which has been completely inappropriate for the mobile web.

It’s all about real-time simplicity

At the heart of Mixpanel’s product is a custom-built database that allows for data collection at massive scale, while at the same time offering simple analytics to users in real-time.  Mixpanel is the ultimate big data solution for analyzing everything users are doing with mobile applications.  So simple is the system to use and set up that many companies who have presented their business at Andreessen Horowitz have displayed their Mixpanel analytics at the pitch meeting to show user traction and cohort analysis.  We realized there was lightening in a bottle when nearly every company developing a web application was showing their user traction through the Mixpanel interface.  So simple, so elegant, and all without any sales effort.

It’s all about time

We at Andreessen Horowitz are ecstatic to have led Mixpanel’s Series A round of $10.25 million and I will be joining the board. Mixpanel analytics arrives exactly in time to take advantage of the massive wave of new mobile applications. We are honored to be partnering with Suhail and Mixpanel in their quest to “help the world learn about its data”.