We’ve been “quietly” busy at my new startup, Yottaa, over the last 6 months. On one end, it took a lot of work to recruit the amazing folks we have in Beijing (getting some work done amid shouting matches with a bad ass construction manager and a crazy cleaning lady is another story). On the other end, we have been coding a cloud service that we call “performance analytics”. The service is just entering private beta.

By the word “quietly”, it sounds like “stealth mode”. I guess you can say that. There seems to be some negative reaction to “stealth mode” over the last few years. My thought is that there is nothing wrong for being “stealth” – however, depending on what “stealth” means. If being “stealth” means not talking to anyone at all, that’s not a good idea. At Yottaa, we were in “stealth” not because we don’t want to talk to people. We talked to people on a daily basis (thank you for your comments and feedback!). We were in the so-called “stealth mode” primarily because putting up a real web site has not been a top priority so far.

However, I realize the danger of not communicating (or talking to small groups only). The data points we have so far are fairly limited no matter how many conversations we have had. We want to build something valuable that people want to use. To that end, I’d better write something up, put it on the web and hopefully get some feedback and comments (before it is too late).

So what is “Performance Analytics”? Over the last ten years, I have been deeply involved with web performance and user experience. I constantly hear “the site is so slow”, “performance sucks” and so on. Over the years, my colleagues and I also played with tools ranging from YSlow, PageSpeed, Gomez, Keynote, PingDom, FireBug, Rockstar Web Profiler (I wrote this) etc. However, none provides good answers to the following questions:

• How does my site performance relate to my business objectives?
• How fast is my site?
• Is there anything wrong with my site? What is it (JavaScript problem, server side issue, DNS issue, network latency, etc.)?
• What do I do if there is a problem?

Yottaa Performance Analytics service attempts to answer these questions. We want to provide business owners of web sites intuitive and relevant information for assessing status and making better decisions. On the other side, we want to provide technical owners of web sites concrete data points and detailed suggestions for actions. Thirdly, we’d like to provide an open database about the entire web that anyone can access and use such performance data.

We are looking for your feedback. If you are interested in joining our beta, please let us know!