M:Metrics Co-Founder Will Hodgman Joins KISSmetrics As CEO

Analytics company KISSmetrics has hired a new CEO — Will Hodgman (pictured), who co-founded mobile analytics data startup M:Metrics.

Hodgman and Hiten Shah, the company’s co-founder and previous CEO, met with me last week to explain the move. Hodgman is leaving an executive vice president role at comScore, which acquired M:Metrics in 2008. Since then he’s been building out the company’s presence in Asia. (His M:Metrics co-founder Seamus McAteer recently launched a mobile ad startup called Metaresolver.) He joined the KISSmetrics board in 2010, presumably due to his experience in the analytics field.

It’s time for the company to “transition R&D and product focus to a sales focus,” Hodgman said — even within the past few months, KISSmetrics has been growing dramatically, and it now has 1,300 paying customers, including some large companies in the Fortune 500 and 100. And while it faces plenty of competition, Hodgman argued that KISSmetrics is “developing a new space, or I should say evolving an old one,” specifically by delivering data that’s focused on people, not devices or cookies.

“We’ve all moved beyond what people refer to as Web 2.0, in terms of services being delivered on the web,” he said. “From an analytics, customer intelligence standpoint, things have not evolved at the same pace.”

Shah is staying on as the head of the product team, while his co-founder Neil Patel will continue to serve as vice president of marketing. Shah said he’s happy to be spending more time on product, especially since Hodgman has more experience with sales and scaling a company.

One area that Shah wants to focus on is mobile (an area that Hodgman certainly has experience with). There are several companies offering mobile analytics products, including KISSmetrics, but Shah said, “We don’t think anyone’s doing it right,” though he isn’t ready yet to talk too specifically about his mobile plans. He added that he wants to offer more segmentation in KISSmetrics data and introduce more features to make the data actionable.