😬 I have a confession: It was a tough journey to discover our focus for eCommerce and Retail.
When we started building our MMM SaaS, we thought it will work the same way in all industries. As long as the customer has big enough marketing budget to justify MMM-based optimization, we're good to go. Right? 😀
We started delivering our service to companies in FMCG, mobile apps, gaming, restaurants, car brands, financial institutions, telcos, streaming services, wholesale, grocery retail, fashion retail, electronics retail, eCommerce and the list goes on.
We quickly ran into challenges. Every new customer in a new industry had something special we had to learn. In FMCG, it was the large share of trade investments and less granular data in general. In telco, it was the complex channel structure with cross-effects.
Since we NEVER compromise on quality of modeling results, we had to invest so much in the customer onboarding for new industries, that it started feeling like a continuous stream of consulting projects. We delivered great service, but the product started fragmenting as each industry had their own special modeling setup. It was hard on the team, as the onboarding deadlines were tough.
We would have never survived this without having such as an amazing team of data scientists (50% of the company) and customer success professionals.
We had to go back to the drawing board.
We noticed we had the largest mass of customers in Retail and eCom and their NPS scores were high. We realized we knew their challenges really well. How to model media impact on new vs. returning customers for eComs, weather's impact to sales in fashion retail, promotions and offline media in grocery retail etc. And we noticed that we can productize all of this so that when a new customer comes in, it's a smooth experience for us and the customer.
It took some time, but in the end the decision was clear. Today, most of our customers are Retailers and eComs (with some retail-like companies in other segments).