Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: One of my observations which pertains primarily to electronic commerce is that the more we can attribute, the more we can tie the marketing and advertising and customer acquisition to actual purchases. As you know, one of the most effective ways of marketing e-commerce is through affiliate programs. It’s 100% performance-based. There are lots of sites and apps that have accumulated huge numbers of eyeballs that they’re not able to monetize today. If more and more of this gap that exists today between traffic, lead generation, and conversion into actual transactions could be bridged, that would really relieve a lot of the friction that exists today between advertising and commerce. Can you comment on that?

Damon Ragusa: You’re absolutely correct on that but there are a few challenges. Part of it is based on the realities of digital marketing. You hit on one point. You talked about affiliate marketing as a good example that can be 100% performance-based, but because it is 100% >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Tableau’s Valuation Increases to $6 Billion

No Billion Dollar Unicorn story can be complete without a discussion on data anlaytics start-up, Tableau Software (NYSE: DATA). Here is the story of how Christian Cabot started this capital efficient unicorn company.

>>>

Achieving Product-Market Fit That Allows You to Build Billion Dollar Unicorns: Gaurav Dhillon, Founder of Informatica and SnapLogic (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: 156 customer calls that you made gave you real conversations about real customer problems. Even though you didn’t sell what you went out to sell, this was a great opportunity to immerse yourself in customers and learn what they were really looking for.

Gaurav Dhillon: This is AB testing to the power of a million.

Sramana Mitra: By the way, this is a process that we use for all our customer validation work. Many of our entrepreneurs who have been part of the Entrepreneur Journeys case study series have shared this process of immersion.

Gaurav Dhillon: In the complex software, hardware, and networking business, this is a tried and tested method. I was a graduate student in Computer Science. If I’d done an MBA, I would have learned this. It’s a great lesson because that is what we then refined and built. We said, “Everybody’s going to need to move the data. Everybody’s going to need to connect the mainframe to the client server. Then they’re going to want to >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 3)

Damon Ragusa: What we do is consolidate data from a lot of different sources. There are three V’s of Big Data—Volume, Velocity, and Variety. Variety is my favorite V. I think you get more value by integrating a larger variety of data to explain the thing you’re trying to understand than just more of the same. Fortunately in this world, we get a lot of both. We get a wide variety of data and we use some nifty algorithms that we’re able to connect all these data—demographic, behavioral, sales, digital click stream—to a modeling framework that allows us to understand and start to simulate how individual people carry out their interactions with the brand and media, and how they buy within a category.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: In terms of your business composition, are you a product business or a services business?

Damon Ragusa: That’s a great question and we’re both. When we started the company, we talked about being a Software-as-a-Service platform. We still do have a SaaS platform that delivers insights and allows our customers to essentially develop a more agile marketing process. We also provide services because without that, it’s difficult for a lot of these organizations to fully integrate the insights that come out of systems like ours and understand best practices and how to move forward. We have customers who view us as an extension of their marketing planning organization. There are other customers who work very hands-on with our software and have very little interaction with us. We provide both as part of our product and service, with a majority of our revenues from the SaaS platform. >>>

Thought Leaders in Big Data: Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine (Part 1)

The dream of digital advertising being 100% measurable and attributable is a myth. In this story, we kick around the issues with Damon Ragusa, CEO of ThinkVine.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with introducing our audience to yourself as well as to the company.

Damon Ragusa: I’m the Founder and CEO of ThinkVine. My background is in events analytics. I’ve spent a couple of decades in the analytics field primarily supporting strategic marketing objectives across B2B and B2C businesses. ThinkVine is a marketing optimization software and services company. We provide four core capabilities to our customers—software platform for planning marketing, the ability to attribute >>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: ServiceNow’s Expanding Market Opportunity

Here is a brief write-up on another Billion Dollar Unicorn Club member — cloud-based IT Services Management (ITSM) vendor, ServiceNow (NYSE: NOW). ServiceNow has shown how to create a multi-billion dollar enterprise by relying solely on domain expertise.

>>>

Billion Dollar Unicorns: Workday’s Ramp to Multi-Billion Valuation

Continuing with the Billion Dollar Unicorn posts, here is another mega hit in the category: SaaS-based enterprise services provider for human resources, payroll and financial management, Workday (NYSE: WDAY). >>>