180: István Mészáros: Merging web and product analytics on top of the warehouse with a zero-copy architecture

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10d ago 59:15

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What’s up everyone, today we have the pleasure of sitting down with István Mészáros, Founder and CEO of Mitzu.io.

(00:00) - Intro
(01:00) - In This Episode
(03:39) - How Warehouse Native Analytics Works
(06:54) - BI vs Analytics vs Measurement vs Attribution
(09:26) - Merging Web and Product Analytics With a Zero-Copy Architecture
(14:53) - Feature or New Category? What Warehouse Native Really Means For Marketers
(23:23) - How Decoupling Storage and Compute Lowers Analytics Costs
(29:11) - How Composable CDPs Work with Lean Data Teams
(34:32) - How Seat-Based Pricing Works in Warehouse Native Analytics
(40:00) - What a Data Warehouse Does That Your CRM Never Will
(42:12) - How AI-Assisted SQL Generation Works Without Breaking Trust
(50:55) - How Warehouse Native Analytics Works
(52:58) - How To Navigate Founder Burnout While Raising Kids

Summary: István built a warehouse-native analytics layer that lets teams define metrics once, query them directly, and skip the messy syncs across five tools trying to guess what “active user” means. Instead of fighting over numbers, teams walk through SQL together, clean up logic, and move faster. One customer dropped their bill from $500K to $1K just by switching to seat-based pricing. István shares how AI helps, but only if you still understand the data underneath. This conversation shows what happens when marketing, product, and data finally work off the same source without second-guessing every report.

About István

Istvan is the Founder and CEO of Mitzu.io, a warehouse-native product analytics platform built for modern data stacks like Snowflake, Databricks, BigQuery, Redshift, Athena, Postgres, Clickhouse, and Trino. Before launching Mitzu.io in 2023, he spent over a decade leading high-scale data engineering efforts at companies like Shapr3D and Skyscanner.

At Shapr3D, he defined the long-term data strategy and built self-serve analytics infrastructure. At Skyscanner, he progressed from building backend systems serving millions of users to leading data engineering and analytics teams. Earlier in his career, he developed real-time diagnostic and control systems for the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.

How Warehouse Native Analytics Works

Marketing tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, and GA4 create their own versions of your customer. Each one captures data slightly differently, labels users in its own format, and forces you to guess how their identity stitching works. The warehouse-native model removes this overhead by putting all customer data into a central location before anything else happens. That means your data warehouse becomes the only source of truth, not just another system to reconcile.

István explained the difference in blunt terms. “The data you’re using is owned by you,” he said. That includes behavioral events, transactional logs, support tickets, email interactions, and product usage data. When everything lands in one place first (BigQuery, Redshift, Snowflake, Databricks) you get to define the logic. No more retrofitting vendor tools to work with messy exports or waiting for their UI to catch up with your question.

In smaller teams, especially B2C startups, the benefits hit early. Without a shared warehouse, you get five tools trying to guess what an active user means. With a warehouse-native setup, you define that metric once and reuse it everywhere. You can query it in SQL, schedule your campaigns off it, and sync it with downstream tools like Customer.io or Braze. That way you can work faster, align across functions, and stop arguing about whose numbers are right.

“You do most of the work in the warehouse for all the things you want to do in marketing,” István said. “That includes measurement, attribution, segmentation, everything starts from that central point.”

Centralizing your stack also changes how your data team operates. Instead of reacting to reporting issues or chasing down inconsistent UTM strings, they build shared models the whole org can trust. Marketing ops gets reliable metrics, product teams get context, and leadership gets reports that actually match what customers are doing. Nobody wins when your attribution logic lives in a fragile dashboard that breaks every other week.

Key takeaway: Warehouse native analytics gives you full control over customer data by letting you define core metrics once in your warehouse and reuse them everywhere else. That way you can avoid double-counting, reduce tool drift, and build a stable foundation that aligns marketing, product, and data teams. Store first, define once, activate wherever you want.

BI vs Analytics vs Measurement vs Attribution

Business intelligence means static dashboards. Not flexible. Not exploratory. Just there, like laminated truth. István described it as the place where the data expert’s word becomes law. The dashboards are already built, the metrics are already defined, and any changes require a help ticket. BI exists to make sure everyone sees the same numbers, even if nobody knows exactly how they were calculated.

Analytics lives one level below that, and it behaves very differently. It is messy, curious, and closer to the raw data. Analytics splits into two tracks: the version done by data professionals who build robust models with SQL and dbt, and the version done by non-technical teams poking around in self-serve tools. Those non-technical users rarely want to define warehouse logic from scratch. They want fast answers from big datasets without calling in reinforcements.

“We used to call what we did self-service BI, because the word analytics didn’t resonate,” István said. “But everyone was using it for product and marketing analytics. So we changed the copy.”

The difference between analytics and BI has nothing to do with what the tool looks like. It has everything to do with who gets to use it and how. If only one person controls the dashboard, that is BI. If your whole team can dig into campaign performance, break down cohorts, and explore feature usage trends without waiting for data engineering, that is analytics. Attribution, ML, and forecasting live on top of both layers. They depend on the raw data underneath, and they are only useful if the definitions below them hold up.

Language often lags behind how tools are actually used. István saw this firsthand. The product stayed the same, but the positioning changed. People used Mitzu for product analytics and marketing performance, so that became the headline. Not because it was a trend, but because that is what users were doing anyway.

Key takeaway: BI centralizes truth through fixed dashboards, while analytics creates motion by giving more people access to raw data. When teams treat BI as the source of agreement and analytics as the source of discovery, they stop fighting over metrics and start asking better questions. That way you can maintain trusted dashboards for executive reporting and still empower teams to explore data without filing tickets or waiting days for answers.

Merging Web and Product Analytics With a Zero-Copy Architecture

Most teams trying to replace GA4 end up layering more tools onto the same mess. They drop in Amplitude or Mixpanel for product analytics, keep something else for marketing attribution, and sync everything into a CDP that now needs babysitting. Eventually, they start building one-off pipelines just to feed the same events into six different systems, all chasing slightly different answers to the same question.

István sees this fragmentation as a byproduct of treating product and marketing analytics as separate functions. In categorie...

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