I am humbled and excited to share some news with you — I have taken on a new role as Keen’s CEO.
I joined Keen as general manager in early 2018 after spending years building new businesses and technologies in healthcare and marketing. While getting up to speed, I had the opportunity to talk to a lot of customers and roll up my sleeves on initiatives that spanned product, marketing, sales, and customer success. I got a true 360-degree view of Keen, learned a ton, and became a big believer in a few things.
Keen is all about helping you share insights with your customers, so in that same spirit, I wanted to share with you my story and why I believe the coming months and years will be truly special.
Keen is a Great Product
It’s easy to say this one without believing it, and it took me a while to be truly convinced.
However, my mind was changed after hearing story after story of how we’ve helped our customers do months of work in just hours. One SaaS startup raised Series A funding because of the analytics their lean, scrappy engineering team built using Keen. One widely recognized SaaS company used Keen to build next-level analytics to sell as part of a premium pricing tier.
Many of our customers have been with us for over half a decade. We’ve helped them grow, and we’ve scaled with them. What a cool experience to see your customers succeed and play a role in their success. All in all, our customers trust Keen to scan over one trillion rows of data each day, which speaks for itself when it comes to our strength and scale.
Keen Has Awesome Customers
Seems obvious, but one of the greatest parts of talking to customers is actually getting to know them and their products. It’s been so energizing to see how various customers across verticals use the Keen platform to present metrics that are hyper-custom and uniquely valuable to their specific users. We have such a bright and creative community
What’s more, our customers genuinely want to help us get better. Last year, we launched Canny to give our customers a voice in our product — we’re constantly getting valuable feedback, and I’m proud that our customers now help us shape our roadmap.
One of my top priorities is making the Keen-customer relationship a value-added, vibrant, and fun one. We’ve already started engaging you in new ways and highlighting some fun applications of Keen in our newsletters. Expect much more to come!
Keen = Customer-Facing Metrics
Keen has always been good across a lot of different use cases, but we were never focused on being world-class for any use case in particular.
I’ll admit, this has held us back for quite some time.
So when we talked to customers, we listened for where Keen helps them in a way no one else can. We heard stories like Pixlee TurnTo’s and
More and more customers shared similar stories, and it became abundantly clear where Keen can be world-class — customer-facing metrics.
It’s nothing new for SaaS companies to build analytics for their internal teams or use out-of-the-box products like Mixpanel or Amplitude. But now SaaS companies are realizing the need to show their customers personalized data, presented seamlessly in their app, in a way that’s designed to enhance user experience.
Why? Customer-facing metrics help SaaS companies retain customers by demonstrating value, attract new customers with data-rich UX, and encourage desirable usage patterns.
But building and maintaining customer-facing metrics is much more complex and involved than product teams expect. Personalized data means collecting customer data from multiple sources, managing tight access controls, and meeting stringent data security standards. Seamless presentation means visualizations are hyper-custom, beautiful, and fully embedded in the application. Enhancing user experience means queries load instantly and platform downtime/outages are a non-starter, no matter the scale.
Analytics tools like Mixpanel and Amplitude don’t support customer-facing metrics at all. And unless you’re a tech giant like Facebook or Netflix, you don’t have a dedicated team to build and maintain them in house.
However, customer-facing metrics is where Keen is at its best! For small or medium-size SaaS companies who move fast and need customer-facing metrics asap, Keen is a no-brainer.
The Future is Bright
When we aligned on being the best customer-facing metrics platform out there, decisions became much easier. We brought on new product leadership and opened a new engineering office so we can rapidly build.
The results in 2018 were promising — we added 10,000 new individual accounts, more than doubled our team, and reached record volumes of data managed by our platform (see: 1 trillion rows of data scanned per day!).
This year, expect us to bring you an overhauled Keen Explorer (i.e., our lightweight workbench that lets you build and customize customer-facing metrics fast), a whole new suite of visualization and frontend features, and big performance and flexibility improvements to our core platform. Our goal is to empower you to build customer-facing metrics more quickly, more flexibly, and with lower overhead than ever before .
Above and beyond our platform, expect us to find new, value-added ways for us to engage with you along your customer-facing metrics journey.
Here’s to new beginnings and an exciting future!
Ben Kuhn,
CEO, Keen
