Houseware Announces Free Access to Product Analytics

Houseware is unveiling a pivotal evolution in our product and company strategy. Houseware Analytics—formerly known as Houseware’s warehouse-native Product Analytics—will now be offered to all customers at ZERO cost.

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Over the past two and a half years, our team at Houseware and our customers have pioneered a data platform-first solution enabling product managers to drive compelling user behaviors. Using a SaaS, seat-based pricing model, Houseware’s product stands as a formidable alternative to primary competitors such as Amplitude and Mixpanel. However, at the beginning of 2024, we began to notice emerging opportunities and trends driven by AI, leading to profound realizations about the future of SaaS companies like ours and, more crucially, product analytics. 

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We strongly believe that:

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1. Product analytics needs to be commoditized to help customers avoid data lock-ins.
2. AI agents should address the missing pieces in product analytics and digital experience.
3. Customers should pay for “work” outputs, as SaaS's price-value relationship is due to a significant change.

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Today, I am excited to share a series of announcements that align our future with these three core beliefs. In this blog, I will provide an overview of the opportunities ahead for Houseware and the rationale behind our bold decision. To know more about Houseware Analytics and learn more about how to get started, read this blog by Sidhant:

Our team is deeply aligned with the challenges within the broader digital experience category. We firmly believe that the timing and potential to enhance an organization’s digital experience in an AI-first world have never been more promising. Our vision centers on AI agents that emulate traditional roles and excel in specific tasks to support marketing and product personas.

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A trip down the Houseware road

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If you are new here, here’s some context. We firmly believe that analytics possess tremendous power to shape both human and business behavior. Our journey began in 2021 with the realization that data platforms and warehouses would become the backbone of all SaaS. “Warehouse native” was a contrarian concept at the time, but we are proud to see that our early belief in this vision has endured and grown in popularity.

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Customers should be free from data lock-ins inherent in traditional product analytics tools. Therefore, we are proud to take a significant step towards commoditizing the category.

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Why commoditize Product Analytics?

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Since the beginning of 2023, Houseware has been dedicated to Product Analytics. Now, however, we are setting our sights even higher. Don’t get me wrong—Product Analytics is a critical mission. Analyzing fragments and traces of data points from millions of users to inform the development of better products is crucial. But it wasn’t always seen this way.

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The category began as a tool to drive the growth of mobile apps, with companies like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Heap (all unsurprisingly YC companies) capitalizing on the mobile boom in the early 2010s to compete with the incumbent Omniture (now Adobe Analytics). However, when we strip away the use-case veneer from the product of “Product Analytics,” customers often perceive it as visualization software, strikingly similar to the Business Intelligence category.

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Commoditization benefits customers and the market by creating a level playing field for technological equality. It enables organizations to view a critical component of their tooling stack as an “endemic” product, integral to their operations.

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The reality is that all product analytics companies occupy a “No Man’s Land.” They struggle to attract VC funding for growth, are no longer the darlings of Silicon Valley, and have limited appeal in the broader enterprise software landscape. Any founder launching an analytics or dashboarding company today must have a compelling reason to do so.

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Here are some reasons why:

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1. The changing role of the Product Leader: The most effective product organizations are only sometimes the most data-driven. Instead, they are often guided by strong leadership with a clear vision, like artists creating art. This belief aligns with our approach at Houseware, which aims to empower product managers with data-actionable insights and intuitive tools that support their creative and strategic decision-making processes. We see AI significantly changing quantitative analytics' role in product decision-making. We also observe a significant overlap, and in some cases, digital and marketing leaders overshadow the product leader. The priorities of these roles are often not addressed by traditional product analytics.
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2. Up-the-Funnel Pipeline, Down-the-Funnel Retention: Through thousands of conversations with product teams, I have realized some harsh truths, particularly about the incomplete nature of product analytics tools. While product analytics is an excellent resource for insight mining, monitoring, and presentation in weekly planning, two key attributes are often overlooked:
   1. The tools need more capabilities to take action on improving retention trends through messaging and experimentation.
   2. Users need to have more visibility on top-of-the-funnel behavioral insights.
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3. Shifting Narrative From Insights to Monitoring: Many in the industry talk about how analytics tools can give unique insights. But their real power is in something else. The principal value of product analytics is their ability to keep an eye on things and spot problems early, maintaining key metrics to ensure digital products work smoothly. This monitoring is crucial because it helps businesses quickly find and fix issues that might otherwise be missed, which could lead to a drop in user engagement and revenue. So, while insights are essential, the constant monitoring to keep things running smoothly makes these tools unique.

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Check out my colleague Ankita’s Blog to learn more about this:

What’s next for Houseware? Swinging for the fences

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Houseware is reimagining the Digital Experience category from the ground up as if it were built today. We believe the timing is ripe for the current leader to be dethroned. With AI’s powerful technology coming into play, we have a narrow window of opportunity. Our customers, accustomed to the same old solutions and UX paradigms, are now open to new UX paradigms and entirely new form factors.

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Houseware’s big bet is on AI agents to create an order-of-magnitude change in outcomes for digital teams. AI agents will start at the bottom of the pyramid, acting as a glorified helpdesk to accomplish tasks more effectively. Given their access to tools, data, and insights across customers, these agents can soon rise up the strategic stack to imagine campaigns and predict outcomes autonomously.

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Stay tuned for exciting announcements on the webinar here.