Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think there are clear winners. At the time that you were describing, Facebook wasn’t the clear winner by any stretch of the imagination. Once you have clear winners with massive market cloud, then those are the options that are being offered by other sites.

Eyal Magen: Right. What also happened is that obviously the user is now moving quickly between different screens – mobile, home computer, and work computer. Any service that wants to provide them with a unified experience across screens will have to ask the users to identify. These are the reasons why identity is becoming so central. We eventually became an enabler for sites to connect with a user using their identity to save the identity and user data, and most importantly, to connect to third-party systems that can leverage the user third-party data for marketing or personalization.

Once we had identified these identity markets as being central, we had to decide whether we were going to serve the SMB market or the enterprise market. That was another decision that we had to make. It’s very close to the lesson that we learned early on. If you look at early data, you can try to find the data. Sometimes it’s worth it but when you’re an entrepreneur, you don’t have a lot of time. It’s not like we do something big every week. Maybe now it’s every month.

Originally, we provided this identity platform free to websites. We actually noticed that bigger sites were using it more and actually asked to pay for it to get better service. Our system is not like an analytic system where you just have to put one line of code. It’s a bit of a more involved integration because it has a product side and a backend side. Eventually, we did a strategic decision to focus on corporate and enterprise clients and not to focus on a self-service kind of an experience for smaller sites.

Sramana Mitra: Let me try to understand this. When it comes to corporate identity, what is the problem? Of course, on the consumer side, we are all now having to log into so many different sites. Having this one Facebook identity to login is very useful. Facebook has obviously won that game. Frame the use case for me in the corporate identity situation. What problem are we solving?

Eyal Magen: When I say corporate, I don’t mean corporate in the sense of employee identity. I mean Internet companies or companies with a bigger Internet presence. The problem that we are solving is when users are using Facebook or Google, they are just doing the first step of providing the data to the website. Now, the website has to do several things. First, the website has to save this data in a secure and private way. These three words are complicated for corporation and enterprise and I’ll explain why.

Now, when you login with Facebook, you come with tons of data, which is unstructured. This data is updating all the time. What we find out is that our clients are going to have the right database format to save this amount of data. The legacy systems were built maybe to save username, last name, first name, and email, but not the amount of data that the user is travelling through the Internet with. Marketers for these companies want this data but they literally cannot save it. The project to change the database to save it are too big.

We provide them with a SaaS cloud-based solution where they can immediately save all the user data. That’s a huge problem for the type of clients that we have. Our typical clients are media companies, e-commerce, or travel companies, or brands that have online presence. Users login to their website, bring their valuable data, and we save that data for that user. As you know, there’s a lot of breaches and security issues with user data and governments are creating more and more regulations around saving data. These enterprise-level clients are multinational companies that have to pay attention to laws.

Sramana Mitra: Your platform essentially provides all of those?

Eyal Magen: Yes.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Successful Pivots on Product, Market, Business Model: Gigya Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer Eyal Magen
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