Analytics Startup Heap Brings Its “Capture Everything” Approach To iOS Apps

Heap, a startup aiming to bring a more comprehensive and flexible approach to analytics, is moving into mobile.

The Y Combinator-incubated company first announced its iOS integration about a year ago, but at the time it was an invite-only product in beta testing. More recently, the company has removed the beta label and opened the product to any developer.

Founder Matin Movassate contrasted the experience of using Heap with the process at Facebook, where he previously worked at a product manager. If he had a data-related question, he had to ask an engineer to write the necessary code, then it would take weeks for the data to “trickle in”, and then he’d have to work with a data analyst to actually get a report that answered his questions. (Movassate said there are similar experiences when using most analytics products.)

“A lot of times you end up working with the data you have, instead of getting the right data,” he added.

Heap, on the other hand, automatically collects data on every action taken by a user (on iOS that includes taps, swipes, form submissions, views, and more) and it then allows customers to pull the data they need without writing any code. You can see the automated event capture in the image above.

Movassate said this approach also makes the data more usable by non-technical team members, like salespeople and marketers: “We found that when an organization adopts Heap, they all use it, instead of it being bottlenecked in IT.”

On iOS, the big challenge was collecting this data without significantly taxing the CPU or the cell network, but Movassate said he succeeded. He said it’s too early to identify any iOS customers, but he would reveal that Heap has 1,000 customers sending in data (including Airbnb, Salesforce.com, Blue Bottle Coffee, and the Onion), and that an increasing number of them are using the iOS capabilities, too.

The company raised a $2 million seed round last year.