Countly’s differentiation out of a very competitive space

Glocal is a podcast on locally incubated global startup success stories.

Countly (featured in Ep.7) is a product analytics company that focused solely on the needs of its target customers and moved away from giant competitors, into an almost blue ocean space. All the notes below are from our conversation with Onur on Glocal podcast.

Product analytics tailored for your needs

Countly’s easy to customize, plugin-based architecture gave extensive capabilities to satisfy specific needs; while its competitors, like Mixpanel (raised $77M), Localytics (raised $70M) and Flurry (raised $75M), offered limited solutions that cannot be customized. Countly moved away from the crowd with its initial positioning and started to compete with crappy in-house enterprise solutions.

Every individual user produces granular data and the need for enterprises grew exponentially as mobile became an integral part of the human life. Countly’s motto was clear from the get-go: product analytics done right.

Full control and ownership of data

All of Countly’s competitors provide analytics as a service on cloud, hosted somewhere around the globe. Countly was smart enough to know that large enterprises are reluctant to give full control of their data to another company. The rise of data privacy and security concerns paved the way for Countly, whose mission was to give full control and ownership of data to its rightful owner, with an analytics service that can be deployed anywhere.

Market segment that is out of reach for competitors

Countly’s special focus on flexibility and security resonated well with enterprise customers who have been pouring resources to build internal tools for a while. Countly tested waters to find the most suitable market for its product and then decided to double down on 3 industries that deal with sensitive data: finance, telco and healthcare. Strong validation from the open-source community played an essential role while creating first contact with large enterprises.

US is the natural market to go after in analytics, but the competition is fierce. Strict regulations for data privacy, like GDPR protecting rights of individuals, made EU an appealing market with almost no competition, especially for Countly. Countly continues to grow fast in Europe, launched its Turkey operations last year after gaining international validation, and tried China but failed due to local competition.

Open-source and strong community validation

Open-source has been Countly’s strategy since the first day. Unlike typical open-source companies, Countly decided not to only sell support and professional services, but rather build a commercial product with extensive capabilities and extra features. The free Community Edition product was great to create word of mouth and reach organic growth, with active content, documentation, online discussions and even 4,000 stars on Github!

Business to developer strategy with white label tools

The extensive editing capabilities and the flexible platform lead the way for Countly to support white label as well. Through developer tools, Countly attracted integration partners, who embedded Countly analytics within their offerings – saving development time and money for them.

Strongly incentivized partner network

Since Countly is not structured as a cloud based traditional SaaS product, it was easier to incentivize partners who would build special features for the customer’s needs and also generate revenue through onboarding and maintenance. Countly built a strong partner network who has the freedom to build on and re-sell the flexible platform.

While other SaaS competitors, like Mixpanel, also have partners; not being able to sell bundled services along with the product leaves minimal margins. Countly partners can even host on behalf of their clients or develop extra plugins that can be resold.

Flexible organizational structure and remotely distributed team

Open-source strategy became a magnet to pull passionate developers as a contributor to the project from around the world, who would later join the Countly team. Countly built a remote and flexible organizational structure to find the best suited candidates from around the globe to cater different operating systems, products, device types etc.

Well-defined fundraising and exit strategy all along

Bootstrapping for a long time gave the ability to fully validate the business dynamics, pivot endlessly and keep things under control.

Countly is growing fast at a very hot space as access to data becomes more important than ever, even more so with AI. Large companies acquire companies only to work with their data and own the continuous stream of data to work with in the future. Countly is at a good point in terms of diversity of data, user behavior and action; and can be a potential target for a number of companies.

The vision is to become the Wordpress of analytics with best plugins, highly flexible and advanced platform.

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