Building a Venture-Scale MarTech Company in Silicon Valley: Chaitanya Chandrasekhar, CEO of QuanticMind (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What form did it take? What tools did you build? What did you enable customers to do that they couldn’t do before?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: We talked about search engines. We talked about social. The problem with all of this is that data is siloed. The marketing teams don’t have one dashboard to control and figure out what is working and what is not working. First thing is, we instrument and figure out what the customer journey looks like. Let’s take a hypothetical customer. You are an e-commerce website. You want to attract customers to buy whatever you are selling. You do that on an ongoing basis. Customer acquisition is bread and butter for you.

Part of your strategy for doing customer acquisition is through ads on Google and Facebook, but you want infrastructure to track the ads that you’re buying. When someone clicks on it, what do they do? This data ends up being stored in multiple analytic and CRM solutions. What we do is tie the ads that you’re buying on different exchanges and allow you to visualize. We then measure all the behavioral data and leverage that data.

If I represent the e-commerce website, I can come to the QuanticMind platform and say, “Sell as many of these SKU’s as long as the cost of selling each is 20% of the revenue.” QuanticMind uses data science and algorithms to figure out what that looks like and says, “The people who are shopping in the Bay Area on a Tuesday two weeks before a big event are four times more likely to buy this as opposed to someone else in Seattle.”

We can leverage data that we are instrumenting and get better results because then we can look at the inflection points and conversion rates to figure out how much we should pay Google or Bing for those ads. It allows us to give better outcomes for the e-commerce companies. The e-commerce company is a customer of QuanticMind and we instrument all of that and help the marketing team get better outcomes.

Sramana Mitra: Are you charging on the basis of cost-per-action? What’s your business model?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: A QuanticMind customer is someone who’s spending, at least, a million dollars or more on customer acquisition. They pay us a SaaS fee. Typically it’s customized on a per customer basis. It’s a software SaaS fee. It’s not a lead generation company. QuanticMind is a software company that sells a platform. , it’s similar to that.

Sramana Mitra: So your company is a SaaS company?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Under the hood, what are you able to do? Can you talk a little bit about the technology?

Chaitanya Chandrasekhar: At its core, it’s a data platform that collects data from a bunch of different places where you’re storing the data and generating the data. I’m talking about the e-commerce company, which has an e-commerce web store and a mobile app. We collect data from both of those.

Behind the web store, there is a CRM that collects information about customers. We need to plug into that. You also have an inventory management system where you’re tracking the cost of goods sold. We’re integrating into that. Last but not the least, you’re also buying ads on Google and Facebook. We’re integrating into those ad systems. When we do all this, the data platform can string a customer journey together.

Let’s say you’re selling widget A and you are advertising on Google. Two people out of 10 people who see the ad click on the ad, and one person buys something. We are able to string that information together. We can say that this customer is valuable because the SKU that he bought was X for which the cost of goods sold was Y. The data platform collects all the data and there is an analytics layer on top of it which gives you all this information.

If you are a business owner, you can run reports. Using those reports, you can understand the efficacy of your campaigns and see where you need to spend more money. That’s the second value proposition. The third order is the automation piece. Let’s narrow down the advertising conversation to Google. Google asks three things from you. It asks you, “Who do you want to show the ads to? What are the ads? How much are you ready to pay for a single click?”

That’s the information it’s asking from every advertiser. Who do you want to show the ad to depends upon the search term. Let’s say a customer of an e-commerce company is searching for sunglasses and types in ‘sunglasses.’ The e-commerce company wants its ad shown for whenever a person is searching for the word sunglasses. It is ready to pay a dollar when someone clicks on the ad. Why should it be a dollar? QuanticMind does all the math to figure out how much we should actually pay Google for a click on that ad so that you can make sure that it is within your cost-per-acquisition budget and you’re actually making a profit.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Venture-Scale MarTech Company in Silicon Valley: Chaitanya Chandrasekhar, CEO of QuanticMind
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