Four years ago, my friends and I embarked on a quest to build a business. We were going to build an analytics API. We dreamed big. Our platform was going to be so elegant and so powerful that, basically, anyone building anything connected to the internet would want to send data there. It would help people understand. It would help them automate. It would help them explore. It would help them discover. It would be the nervous system for the next great version of the internet.
In those four years, we’ve made some progress :). We built a database in the cloud. We built an API that allows you to query it, in real time, from anywhere. We built charting libraries so that developers could paint their apps with pies and bars.
And the whole time, we watched, delighted and amazed, to see what developers would create with these building blocks we had fashioned for them. We beamed when they showed us their dashboards. We cried when a real life rocket scientist showed us data from the Mars rovers. We watched, and we listened, as we learned, as thousands of developers integrated Keen into their products and built their businesses.
One of the main patterns we noticed was that many people were using our platform not only to analyze their business data, but to display data in the applications they were building for their users.
I’ve always thought of our business as a very organic thing, a jungle with wide-reaching and thickening roots, spreading and collecting data from all over the earth (and space!). But there is so much more to it than collecting data. The most exciting part has been seeing how people have taken that data and reflected it back out into the world. To see those roots grow into trees, and branches, and a striking variety of leaves and flowers.
It was this common usage pattern, alongside the growing demand for analytics views in nearly every modern SaaS application, that inspired us to build a number of core features that make building analytics natively into your application even faster and more powerful.
Today we’re announcing Native Analytics, a core product on the Keen platform. I hope you’ll take a peek at our new landing page, our product overview, and possibly even drop a note (see chat button, bottom right!) to talk about building analytics into your product. We’ve learned a lot over the years and look forward to building and sharing with you as we continue to grow.
