Building cross-platform analytics sounds fairly straightforward until you start collecting the data. Then you find out each platform does things differently.
Working on Clipflow's analytics meant dealing with those differences and fitting them into the production workflow our teams already used. It was a difficult backend problem, and I enjoyed working on it.
The interesting part for me was the reason for collecting the numbers. We wanted to help people decide which content to make more of. Teams were tracking things in spreadsheets, and we wanted to make that information easier to get and use.
That gives the technical work a clear purpose. You can spend a long time dealing with integrations, but the customer needs an answer they can act on. The effort behind that answer shouldn't become their problem.
I've always liked complex challenges. Fewer people may be willing to work through them, and there's satisfaction in figuring out how the pieces fit. But difficulty by itself doesn't make a useful feature.
We were building analytics from the perspective of a team producing content. That changed what we cared about and how we wanted the information to connect to their work. It gave us an angle beyond displaying another collection of numbers.
I think this is a good question for technical founders to keep asking: what does solving this hard problem let the customer do?
If you can answer that clearly, the engineering effort has a direction. You can take on the complexity without expecting the customer to appreciate it. They just need the useful result on the other side.
