Understanding user experience is the core of creating and developing successful products. Analytics helps tracking users easily as it automates the collection and management of data. Smart companies use product analytics to analyze their users and improve their customer experiences. Countly is a real-time analytics platform that provides information on application usage and end-user behavior. It empowers marketing executives, IT administrators and product managers by giving them total insight into how their application behaves in different scenarios.

By providing important information about their users and their mobile applications, Countly helps its customers increase user loyalty and retention, improve usability, identify bottlenecks, fix issues, and gain competitive advantage.

In layman terms, Countly is an open source, enterprise-grade mobile & web analytics marketing platform. It collects data from devices and visualizes this information to get more insights from users and improve the product. The company has more than 150 enterprise customers on board helping them bridge the gap between their data and insights.

The Inception Story

The company was Co-founded by Dr. Gorkem Cetin, CSO; and Onur Alp Soner, CEO when they wanted to build a social mobile app product. It was all going well until the product went live and statistics started to appear. Unfortunately, in 2010, there were no good real-time mobile analytics products available with required features, so they decided to build their own product analytics service and incorporate it into the app.

A few months later, the product did so well that they decided to work on it more than building a social mobile app. Countly was initially born as an open source solution and eventually took off after providing software and services to enterprises.

The Driving Force of Countly

 Dr. Gorkem Cetin is a seasoned product manager having more than 25 years of industry experience. He worked in several enterprises, telco operators, financial institutions and R&D companies, focusing on product management, project management, data security and privacy. He is owner of 5 books and 2 book chapters, as well as more than 10 international papers. He has been in Countly's board of directors and serving as CSO since 2015.

A Dynamic Platform

 Countly has a very clear mission and vision when it comes to getting 360-degrees insights from mobile, web and desktop. Countly's three pillars of business are specific to the company and there are no other vendors that can provide a service that matches what it offers.

"First and foremost, we have the ability to provide the most secure, privacy-oriented on-premise solution where we fully believe that data collected by our vendors should belong to them. Second, Countly is a plugin-based platform that allows its customers to write plugins and enhance the platform. And third, Countly comes packed with powerful plugins such as user profiles, push notifications, crash analytics and attribution. You don't need to use 10 different products anymore and will have access to all the tools you need from a single secure dashboard," said Dr. Cetin.

Standing Out from Competitors

Countly is technically and business-wise different from its competitors in many ways.

Real-time analytics: Most of Countly's competitors show analytics information several hours later, after collecting the data. Countly directly shows this data real-time, enabling product managers to get insights and increase market potential of the application.

Open source: Countly is an open source product, that is, the core of the product is distributed with source code. This way, the community can contribute to the product, increasing the feature set so it fits their needs.

Well-designed user interface: Countly, among the competitors, has the best looking, user-oriented interface. We spent several weeks refining, reiterating and finalizing the dashboard in order to make Countly have a UI which increases the effectiveness and satisfaction of the user.

The Remarkable Achievements

 Countly has been funded by Seedcamp in 2013 and the company received several awards and mentions in the last 5 years. Countly has been featured by Gartner twice in the "App analytics vendors" report globally, in 2016 and 2018. G2 Crowd recognized Countly "in the top 10 list of popular and highly rated mobile analytics products".  Mobbo listed Countly as #7th largest deployed Android analytics SDK worldwide.

Countly have always been very notorious about good customer feedback due to the fact that the company is putting an enormous energy and effort behind customer success. "Most of the customers tell us that they have been testing several analytics platforms, and Countly is by far the best among all. The main reason is that we are a product company, and not sales and marketing, and our efforts go into making a very capable platform from the ground up," stated Onur.

Tackling Challenges Head-On

 Countly's all 20 employees have been working remotely since day one. "This has its own challenges for some, but mostly it is very rewarding as we are not a big company with lots of rules and regulations. Since all of us are geographically distributed, communication may be an issue if there is a big-time gap among some of the employees. However, with the introduction of new technological advancements in communication, this disadvantage has mostly been solved," Dr. Cetin believes.

Looking into the Future

 The company believes that machine learning and artificial intelligence will rule the world, and they will form a basis towards understanding data better and without human intervention. Until recently the team had to dive into data and have always tried to get insights by making experiments, however, this is going to change dramatically that machines will be automatically doing those experiments for us, and use the best result to drive better user experiences.