Building an analytics product with a clear & honest customer focus - with Maciej Zawadziński from Piwik Pro

Show Notes

Our major goal is to focus on our customers. 

I guess this kind of sentence you will find in any presentation of digital product vendors, maybe even beyond. 

So people always claim that they take the customers first, that they do everything for their customers. And yes, to some degree they do. In the end, they bring the revenue, and so they might listen to what customer says.

But customer focus comes on different levels and talking to Maciej from Piwik Pro shows what real customer dedication looks like. 

He explains how Piwik Pro is really building around their customer feedback, and for their customer’s use cases. Everything is measured if it solves the problem or not. And you will see this as a constant pattern in this episode. 

So Maciej started out contributing to Piwik as an open-source project because he needed it for his own product. And then he started to build a consulting business around it. And at some point recognized that it needs a different product beyond the open source one to really solve the client’s use cases. And so it became Piwik Pro and got a completely new foundation. And from the early days, it was built for use cases where data is more sensitive as if you just buy shampoo. Like as government services, health care, or intranets. All before GDPR came around.

And now Piwik Pro is on a clear growth trajectory with a lot of early investments and decisions paying off. 

I hope you enjoy the conversation in the same way I did.

What is Meet the analytics stack?

We are talking to founders and thought leaders in the analytics space in this podcast. We learn about the motivations behind the products they offer. We discuss new topics that shape the analytics space.

These are exciting times where the data space is exploding, and so are ways to collect and analyze data.

Some years ago, it was pretty easy for most companies to decide on an analytics tool.
Either you go for an all-purpose solution like Google Analytics.
Or you need something special for your mobile app or product team, so Amplitude.
Or you just want the raw data without much effort: Segment.

Today it has become a science of its own to find the proper tracking & analytics setup. What made it so complicated?

- GDPR & Browser protection added more measures what you can track and where to store the data
- Google will sunset the old Google Analytics version, so you can only use GA4 in the future
- Plenty of more competition in each analytics category (which is a good thing)
- New categories like privacy-aware and simple analytics solutions

Deciding for a tracking and analytics stack should take a bit. It’s an essential part of your setup, so it should meet your current requirements to some degree (no one can look into the future).