This startup claims to help increase user loyalty and retention by up to 30%

Photo credit: NYC Media Lab

The meteoric growth of App Annie shows how hungry startups are for analytics regarding their platform or service. But while App Annie focuses exclusively on app metrics, there’s still room for a tool that analyzes the mobile web.

That’s the space Istanbul-headquartered Countly hopes to dominate. The startup, which has been in existence for about two years, started purely as an open source product. It now offers both free and paid versions, and helps enterprise users understand what people are doing inside their apps.

The free version is great for “basic metrics,” explains Onur Alp Soner, co-founder of Countly. These metrics include things like how many active users an app has, how they’re discovering the service, how much time they’re spending using it, and which countries they belong to. The paid version is useful for more complicated analysis – such as the device used by people in China who have been using the app for more than 10 days. “It allows you to dig deeper into the data,” adds Onur.

Countly’s product is sorted according to mobile, web, game, and IoT analytics. Each feature is completely customizable, helping administrators track things like in-app purchases, push notifications, conversion funnels, crash reports, and customer acquisition. Onur says the breadth of Countly’s metrics helps solve the problem of resorting to several tools to measure each aspect of your site’s performance.

“In today’s world, if you need analytics, you use five different tools, such an in-app analytics, external analytics, push notification tools, crash analytics, and user profiles […] we offer all this inside a single dashboard. Enterprise clients can use this data to analyze performance of marketing campaigns and send targeted push notifications to increase loyalty and retention,” he adds.

Personal problem

The idea behind Countly came after the founders, who were both formerly employed in the mobile sector, found it difficult to obtain precise analytics for their specific apps. At the time, the only available analytics tools were Flurry and Google Analytics. Onur says these options were limited and didn’t work for them as their dashboards weren’t customizable or flexible. Furthermore, they were too invasive in terms of data-sharing.

Since Countly’s open source product launch on GitHub, the startup has managed to scale to 50 paid enterprise users, some of which are Fortune 100 companies. Its free version currently tracks over 2,000 servers, collecting 50 billion data points every month, claims Onur.

Funding for the startup came from the Seedcamp accelerator, after which it’s remained bootstrapped. There’s a small team, 11 people in total, but the company is profitable. It plans to raise another round of funding in the near future.

The next step for the startup is to launch an analytics plugin marketplace. This will enable people to use Countly to do away with developing in-house analytics software. Onur explains that they’re trying to create the “Wordpress of analytics,” so that people can develop and sell plugins.