RJMetrics enables Crowdtap to track lean startup metrics for pirates
Crowdtap is a fun, social game that lets its users gain VIP status and access exclusive content and products, while earning perks and rewards for collaborating with their favorite brands. For brands and agencies Crowdtap is the influencer marketing platform allowing them to connect with their most influential consumers. Since launching in early 2011, Crowdtap has grown rapidly and its members have completed millions of actions for its 'tapped in' agencies and brands like American Express, Old Navy, Diageo, and more.
Business Problem
Crowdtap architected its product around a relatively new type of database, called MongoDB. The name MongoDB is derived from the word “humongous,” which accurately described the amount of data Crowdtap expected to process. One of a growing number of “NoSQL” databases, MongoDB launched in only 2009, and has since been used in many systems including those at the NY Times, craigslist, and now Crowdtap.
Unfortunately, with a relatively new database technology, Crowdtap found it difficult to access key metrics that the company needed. Kareem Kouddous, Crowdtap's Head of Technology explains, “We try to adhere to lean startup best practices. We believe in startup metrics for pirates - member Acquisition, Activation, Referral, Retention and Revenue; or AARRR. Those are five key metrics that we really needed to track. Early on, we were running manual queries as scripts, which was a pain with Mongo, because Mongo didn't have as rich a querying language as a relational database. There was a lot of manual work where we were basically exporting data into CSV files and tallying up the totals or manually copying data into spreadsheets to track progress over time.”
This ad hoc data gathering process was not sustainable. Kouddous felt that he could not dedicate the time necessary to generate the metrics that his business users needed, “because the other time was spent coding, thinking about the architecture, or partnering with products to figure out how best to meet our customer needs. At that point, we started evaluating the business intelligence services out there.”
Solution: RJMetrics
Crowdtap decided to use RJMetrics because of its integration with MongoDB. “They set us up with an initial set of charts, and that initial setup put us in a really good place. Now we've iterated, modified and customized those initial charts, and today we've got cohort charts, participation charts, activity charts, and a bunch of others.” Kouddous relies on the important lean startup metrics that he accesses through RJMetrics. “It's not just the total number of members, or the total number of clients. We track everything, for example, retention – we look at the viral coefficient and quickly get a sense of how things are doing. Having RJMetrics has helped us really figure out what we wanted to measure.”
The board at Crowdtap is pleased with the insight that RJMetrics gives them too. Kouddous adds, “We've given our board members access to RJMetrics. They can look at several executive level dashboards to see the key metrics that are driving our business. They can go in there without asking us to get the data for them. They're probably pulling a high level view every few weeks.”
Ongoing Value and Support
With easy visibility into Crowdtap, Kouddous adds, “Now that the key metrics of our business are stable and improving, one use we've found for RJMetrics is doing deep research. We have a hypothesis, like ‘what are good members in our system?' And ‘what are some attributes of those members?' Since we have users that have done a lot of actions over a long period of time, we can do that research through RJMetrics. For example, recently, we hypothesized that people who liked cash rewards were not the best members in the system. And through RJMetrics, we confirmed that was true. Now we're considering changing our game mechanics, or our incentive structures to reward our best members.”
Kouddous recalls how much easier it is to do his job with RJMetrics. “I no longer have to do that much when it comes to data... actually I hardly have to do anything. RJMetrics now interfaces directly with the product team, and deals with all the technical stuff without taking any of my time. I no longer have to spend that much time anymore getting data out.” And he gives high marks for the customer service. “It's a ten out of ten!”
If you are interested in learning more about RJMetrics you can learn How it Works, read the latest post at our blog, The Metric System, or sign up for a demo below.
