Trialfire Begins Selling Code-Free Analytics Service For Apps And Websites

Toronto-based startup Trialfire is launching a service so companies can track customers as they interact with applications and websites without the need for data analysts and technical support. The company’s new software allows companies to collect every user click, navigation and entered field, without the need for fancy coding. “This way you don’t have to add any custom code to track specific actions,” says co-founder Michael Lieberman.

To use Trialfire’s software to communicate directly with Google Analytics, Mixpanel, Intercom or other services, users launch their sites in what the company calls “pin mode”: Customers just click on the function they want to track. The software places a pin to indicate an action is being tracked — like a GPS with points of interest. Regular visitors are never aware of Trialfire, but whenever they perform a tracked action, an event is sent to the connected services.

So far, the company has raised an undisclosed amount of seed funding from investors who had backed Lieberman’s previous effort, Datastay, which Autodesk acquired in 2011.

“When we were a startup it was my co-founder Mike that would always ask, ‘can you integrate something into the website for me’. When we were part of a larger enterprise there were seven product managers and five marketing guys asking the same questions,” said Trialfire’s fellow co-founder, Max Kremer.

Lieberman and Kremer spent two years at Autodesk after the acquisition, and during that time the problems that marketing and sales departments experienced became even more apparent. “The rub between marketing/product and development is real: business people rely on developers to get their stuff working, but development’s focus is on core product stuff (aka the fun/important stuff),” wrote Lieberman in an email.

Other companies are also tackling similar problems. Segment.io lets developers code integrations and send the data they collect to third-party services, but doesn’t offer the code-free approach that Trialfire uses. Meanwhile Heap Analytics and Hublo are providing code-free approaches to gathering and visualizing analytics.

“We actually had several ideas when were considering leaving Autodesk — this was the one that made us horniest,” Lieberman wrote in an e-mail. “The leadership at Autodesk actually offered us the opportunity to stick around and basically work for ourselves on our own ideas without reporting to anyone but the big boss. Pretty sweet offer, but we wanted to work on Trialfire, which wasn’t really an Autodesk type project.”