So if I understand correctly, let say I run a blogging service I could offer the blogs running on my service mixpanel analytics data for their particular blog?
i think the problem that may arise, is that the big players have the resources to roll their own solutions + their own solution would mean they can integrate the data that is specific to their app and the smaller players will have a problem paying(provided the platforms would have to pay for each datapoint)
They'd have to roll their own mixpanel though, right? I think unless those big companies are in the analytics space full time already, they'd have a damn difficult time convincing their managers of make v buy.
Plus, presumably some of the small companies already using Mixpanel will be big-company-worrying medium companies in due course.
On a related note, what has attracted us to Mixpanel so far is that is is very generic - I've not come across a case yet that can't be made to work with the event triggers. Mind you, I've not used it live - just read the docs - so I may be speaking out of my cloaca ;)
Don't worry about your competitors. Focus on your product.
Big players move slowly. Most of the times it is easier, faster, and more profitable to buy the startup instead of building their own product to "compete".
E.g., Google could have built something similar to adMob, yet it decided to buy it.
I believe this is an even bigger market than the one Mixpanel was previously tackling. There are innumerable UGC sites online today, and they all want to offer analytics to their customers. For every one of them to build their own comprehensive web analytics system is just silly. Until now there was no product that solved this problem for them.
If Mixpanel's product becomes sufficiently powerful and flexible, it can become the standard for "analytics on someone else's site" just as much as Google Analytics is the standard for "analytics on your own site".
Definitely a wide open space, current GoodData seems to have the most mature product offering here (but it's still very internal 'talk to the sales guy'-ish)
Congrats - there is definitely a market for this. Although my only concern would be that its every bit as deep as your primary market. This will creep into requests for daily emails, multiple levels of permissions, embedded dashboard feature requests, user customization, etc.
If so, that's a pretty good idea.