ERA portfolio company TripleLift (ERA2 W’12) has been acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.4B
We are thrilled to share fantastic news with you about our latest unicorn, TripleLift: the company has been acquired by Vista Equity Partners for $1.4B.
Congratulations to Eric, Shaun, Ari and the whole team!We are incredibly proud of them and the amazing company they have built.
We met the team at the end of 2011— in the earliest days of their exploring a new business—and became the company’s first investor in 2012. Since then, we have seen them become one of the most important adtech companies in the world. TripleLift’s development from Native programmatic — to display, video and branded content — tocommercializing breakthrough products in Connected TV — has been nothing short of remarkable.
We have been so fortunate to have worked with them every step of the way and can’t wait to see what’s next for the company as it enters its next new chapter.
NYC’s Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator Announces Participants for its Winter 2021 Program; Companies Receive $100,000 Investments
New York—January 11, 2021—Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) today announced that it has selected its Winter 2021 class, which begins today. The companies selected to participate in the four-month program are innovating in a variety of significant industries, all with businesses ready to take advantage of ERA’s platform and the broader New York City opportunity.
This is the Accelerator’s 20th program. ERA’s initial investment in participant companies is $100,000.
BaristaValet is an app-based virtual coffee shop platform for luxury residential buildings. We deliver a premium lifestyle amenity – the essential local coffee-shop experience – directly to renters’ doorsteps, so they can save time and stay in. Based on cost-efficient ghost cafes, BaristaValet scales quickly and helps property developers offer experiential F&B amenities and generate more revenue.
BlendED is a marketplace for college learning materials. We use machine learning to analyze syllabi and recommend the best materials from our network. We help professors sell the content they produce to professors seeking fresh content for their courses, and enable under-resourced professors to teach their best.
CarrotFi is a software platform that improves debt resolution for lenders and consumers. We help financial institutions better engage with distressed mortgage customers, helping to increase recoveries and save more homes from foreclosure. Our AI decisioning algorithms recommend actions to improve borrower health while also boosting lender profitability.
FixFake is an authentication-as-a-service platform for e-commerce resellers and retailers. Our APIs verify the provenance of products, detect potential fraud, and accelerate authentication in inventory processing. We improve margins by reducing verification costs and drive new revenue by increasing throughput for e-commerce platforms.
GETMr. is a preventive health and wellness skincare brand for men. Starting with The Daily, a 3-in-1 moisturizer, aftershave, and broad-spectrum sunscreen, our products improve overall skin health and reduce the risk of cancer and skin damage. Our dermatologist developed, all-natural skincare products are safe, effective, and have been formulated for men’s skincare needs.
Hopscotch is a technology company for in-person and virtual pediatric behavioral healthcare. Our HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform gives providers gamified interventions for patient sessions and homework, tools to enable data-driven care, and dedicated family/child portals. We improve patient outcomes through adherence to treatment follow-up, expand access to care, and give providers and families transparency into the child’s progress.
neurobotx is an autonomous brain-derived spatial AI company. We use event-based sensors combined with standard video cameras to remove all unnecessary data and provide companies with actionable intelligence. We improve our customers’ business model towards autonomous robotics. neurobotx is based on 30 years of Nobel Laureate R&D, with commitments in construction, aerospace, and automotive corporations.
OTONOMI is a parametric insurance solution for carriers. Starting with travel coverage, our infrastructure technology automates claims, digitizes policy distribution, and generates predictive analytics. We help insurance carriers reduce claim admin costs by 90%, increase sales for travel distributors, and expedite consumer claim refunds.
Revmo is an enterprise platform that allows professionals to find other professionals in their network and their network’s network. Our unique algorithm allows users to connect and interact with desired contacts quickly and naturally through close, familiar connections while masking the relationship owner’s identity.
Sensegrass is a soil intelligence platform for fertilizer management. We use a combination of AI-based recommendations and soil sensors to deliver real-time soil health analyses and targeted nutrient management. We help farmers and companies reduce chemical fertilizer use, increase crop yields, and grow more sustainably.
The Verticale is a digital retailer for the new era of consumerism where people can discover innovative, value-driven brands (DTC/DNVBs) – in one trusted place. Our dynamic approach merges content and commerce, bringing the consumer a new shopping experience centered around newness, brand affinity, and conscious consumerism.
Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator (ERA) is New York City’s leading technology accelerator and early-stage venture capital fund. It has invested in 226+ start-ups since launching in 2011. Its alumni companies, who come from all over the world, are already playing leading roles in the evolution of virtually every major global industry. To date, ERA alumni companies have raised more than $1 billion in capital and collectively exceed $4 billion in market capitalization.
Katapult to Become a Publicly Traded Company through Merger with FinServ Acquisition Corp. Transaction values Katapult at a pro forma enterprise value of approximately $1 billion
News from portfolio company Katapult (original founders Chinedu Eleanya and Brandon Wright (W’13)). Katapult has entered into a merger agreement with FinServ Acquisition Corp. NASDAQ:$FSRV to become a publicly traded company. See full press release here: Katapult Investor Relations
What Managers Can Do To Support The Mental Health Of Their Teams
The way we work has fundamentally changed, even in the past few months. From babies in the background of Zoom calls to mass layoffs, COVID-19 has taken its toll on the US economy and the mental health of its workers. Unemployment peaked at 15% in April and up to one-third of US jobs may be vulnerable to the effects of COVID-19.
As companies begin to return to the office or decide to work remotely long-term, greater flexibility and strong and compassionate leadership are needed to make the transition work. The pressure can be greater for managers who have to balance their own work and wellbeing in addition to the impact of the crisis on their teams. The good news is, the same things that make you a good manager can help you support the mental health of your teams.
Engaging and effective communication can improve the mental health and wellbeing of your teammates
Setting clear expectations and providing effective feedback can help alleviate stress
Letting your employees know exactly what you expect from them can relieve the burden of having to guess. Think about the last time you were uncertain about whether or not you were doing the right thing or doing a good job. The mental energy it takes to be uncertain about something detracts from other, more important things.
Not all effective feedback has to be positive, but it should be constructive. Providing effective feedback can give your teammates the energy and confidence to give great feedback to you in return. This can then be used to inform your own practice and boost your own confidence as a manager.
Creating a communication calendar for yourself can help you manage your strategy and conserve your energy
When it seems like the days are all running together and information is coming at us from all sides, it can be helpful to organize your thoughts and efforts to protect your own mental health.
You could send out a team update every Tuesday or hold virtual office hours on Friday mornings. Typically, there’s no such thing as too much (effective, engaging, and useful) communication.
You can also make sure that you’re checking in with team members about things other than work. Explicitly checking in on their mental health or the health of their families or asking how they’re planning to recharge at the weekend or take time for themselves can strengthen social ties and reduce feelings of isolation.
And you don’t have to create all of your communication from scratch. If your CEO sends out a company-wide update, reply just to your team with comments about how the news affects them and highlight how their roles fit in with what the company is doing.
Active and empathetic listening is also important for mental health
Understand that everyone has their own unique experience and that you might not know the entire story, even if you ask. Stay curious and respectful and give people time to answer questions and provide explanations. Keeping the lines of communication open and engaging will allow you to help your team understand what is needed from them.
Model boundary-setting and preventative self-care
You might be thinking, it’s a lot of extra work for me to make sure everyone else is okay—what about my own mental health?
The good news is, it’s even more important that you take care of yourself first! You can’t pour from an empty cup. Tell your team that you won’t be checking email on the weekends or that you’re stepping away from your computer for lunch or you’re taking a staycation day. Work pauses into your day to check in with yourself and recharge and encourage your teams to do the same.
When your home and office are the same, it can be incredibly difficult to separate the two. Figure out your own self-care plan and how you’re going to create boundaries between work and homelife and share your plans with your team.
Although you have one eye on the bottom line, remember that we’re still in the middle of a global health crisis. Trust your employees are doing the best work they can and encourage them to set and express their own boundaries.
Normalize the conversation about mental health on your team
In addition to setting boundaries and sharing self-care plans, one of the most impactful things you can do as a manager when it comes to supporting the mental health needs of your team is to normalize the conversation about mental health itself.
If you’re taking a mental health day, going to your own therapy appointment, or are just feeling off, sharing that with your team if you’re comfortable doing so can open the doors for others to do the same. Mental health stigma is still a very real problem and has a huge impact on how we discuss mental health as well as how we seek support. If you are able to normalize the conversation and lessen that stigma, that’s an important step toward providing mental health support for your teams.
Make sure your teams know what mental health resources are available at your company
The quick pivot to physical distancing and remote work has increased feelings of isolation. Some companies are starting to return to the office, while others have announced long-term remote work plans. Still others have reopened with assurances that they’ll close in the event of an outbreak. The fear and uncertainty in both the world and the workplace might cause employees to hesitate to ask for help or support.
Don’t assume anyone remembers what was mentioned in onboarding, if it was mentioned at all! If you don’t know what resources are available, ask your human resources department, and you can be even more proactive and assume that if you don’t know, others don’t either. Suggest company-wide communication that explains what resources are available to all employees. This will serve a dual purpose of not only informing employees of the support available to them, but also indicating that utilizing the mental health resources is supported by the company.
Advocate for additional mental health support at your company
As a leader, you can have a great impact on what mental health resources and services your company provides. From EAPs to meditation to group sessions with mental health professionals to therapy, the ways companies can support the mental health of their employees is vast and varied.
Think about what services you would like to receive and poll your team. Ask people in your network what support their companies provide. Make the case to human resources or executive leadership for why additional support is needed and what types of resources teams are requesting. And if you’re in an executive role, you can make a huge impact on the mental health and wellbeing of your employees by prioritizing providing mental health support at your company.
Anyone can improve their communication, model boundary-setting and preventative self-care practices, normalize the conversation about mental health, and see what support their companies offer, but managers have a unique role in protecting the mental health of their teams and leading the charge to reduce mental health stigma in the workplace.
You already have the skills you need to make a difference when it comes to wellbeing at your organization. Be mindful of your own wellbeing and confident in the fact that you’re making work—and life—better for your team.
How many programmers does it take to sell perfume on the Internet?
The correct answer, well, it depends on a number of factors. It ranges from how to whom, and why to sell. Hi, my name is Andrey Rebrov, I am the CTO and co-founder of the company Scentbird, a perfume subscription service. Currently, 37 people work with me in the development team. Frontend, backend, and mobile developers, as well as testers, a SRE, and a data scientist. One of the most frequent questions I am asked is why we have so many developers in the company. On the one hand, I will try to answer this question, on the other, I will tell you how a modern e-commerce/subscription business works in conditions when the company’s business model has some peculiarities.
Some information about our business
It all started in 2013, when we just started working on our startup and a question quickly arose – do we want to use a ready-made solution, for example do we use Warby Parker (which inspired our first business model), which uses Magento, or do we write everything from scratch? Due to my own recklessness and experience in development (and knowledge of only Java) my head was drunk on ideas. I actively insisted on the second option, saying that this is the only way we could make the online service that we wanted. The irony is that we have changed the business model several times since then. In the summer of 2014, communicating with the guys from Warby Parker and asking them for advice, the very first thing they said was not to use Magento.
I will pause for a moment here and tell you how the service works. From the point of view of the buyer, everything is simple. You go to the site, register, enter your card details and address and in a few days your first package arrives. Then every month money is withdrawn from your account and you receive a new parcel. It all seems super easy (c) But we still need to talk about the business model, so let’s talk about everything in order.
So, the first part of the original business model was the “try before you buy” approach. It works like this:
· The client chooses up to three bottles of perfume
· They place an order
· They try it for a week, choose what to keep and what to return
· As soon as we receive the parcel back, we charge the customer for the amount that the fragrances cost
Let’s leave aside issues of fraud and deception on the part of customers (if you only knew how many people in Russia would call this model “idiotic” and “this cannot work”. Meanwhile, Warby Parker’s revenue is $250 million. There are a lot of solutions on the market to protect against this, although if you go deeper, you need a custom solution). So, the “try before you buy” approach itself does not lend itself to standard e-commerce solutions (although if you know of any it will be interesting to hear about them). What are the nuances here:
· Variations in how much money to take immediately and how much at the end, depending on the order placed
· How long can a transaction be kept open
· The relationship between the status of the package and the status of the transaction – as soon as the package is returned, you need to perform the transaction, and so on
The second part of the first business model was recommendations. I immediately foresee tons of comments that there are many such services, such as Retail Rocket. Yes, there are. But there are a few “buts”:
· Third party solutions cost money, but a startup doesn’t have money to burn
· External solutions usually work with big data, but at the beginning we had few users and not many products
· I wanted to make a decision that was deeply tied to the properties of perfumes, and not just the similarity of products to each other
Then several months passed while we attempted to promote sales, but it became clear that something had to change. After trying out a few more ideas, we finally arrived at what we have today, a monthly subscription. Let’s see what it consists of:
· A mechanism that debits money from the client on the desired month and day (billing day)
· A mechanism for the automatic recovery of clients in cases where a payment has failed, including communicating with the client (recycling & dunning)
· Functionality for customizing orders, since we allow the client to choose the exact products they will receive the following month
· Integration with the Order Management System (OMS) to place orders, receive the tracking number of the package, and the status of the package itself
Let’s stop and go over each item separately, since there are many interesting things to consider
About payments
These days there are many systems that allow you to manage subscriptions. These are called subscription management systems. The most famous of them are: Stripe, Recurly, Zuora, Braintree. These platforms usually have the following capabilities:
· Define a subscription plan – how often and how much should it cost
· Create a customer profile with an address book (billing & shipping address. In the USA the tax amount depends on this), payment method, and their subscriptions and payments
· Create various discounts and promotions (e.g. second month free)
· Various analytics – the number of active subscriptions, MRR — monthly recurring revenue (one of the main metrics of the subscription business describes how much per month you earn from active subscriptions, including discounts and other things), churn rate – the rate of customer loss, and so on
· Integrate with external tools to automate tax reporting, fraud prevention, and more
· Automatic renewal of customer subscriptions in cases where the payment has failed
Now we come to one of the cornerstones of subscription services – how well you do with payments. Let’s consider what are the difficulties associated with the functions of the payment services that are described above.
Historically, most of them work with purely digital services, such as listening to music. We are a service that sends physical goods and the difference is that we generate value just once during the billing cycle. That is when we send out a package, while digital services generate value every day. What’s the problem with this? In cases where you have several subscription plans and you need to calculate the charges for the plan, then in the case of digital (specifically, this is hardwired into the system by default), a prorate system works, the calculation depends on the number of days that have passed since the last payment. In our case, it is tied to the event of sending a parcel. So, we need to calculate and support this by ourselves.
Now, let’s move on to the customer profile. As a rule, there are no problems here, but there are a lot of nuances with various payment systems (Apple Pay, PayPal, Google Wallet) and how well the payment service is supported, which version, and in what volume. So, sometimes you have to use a supporting solution here and there.
Discounts and promotional offers. This is one of my favorites because we have such opportunities on our site now:
· X% discount for the first month
· $Y Discount for the first month
· Second month for free
· Pay for two months at once and get a third for free
· Get a 3/4/5 month discount for Z%
· Groupon promotions with variations (fixed length of subscription without auto-renewal, fixed length of subscription with auto-renewal, collecting card data or not collecting, whether to make an initial payment or not)
· Trial period
· Referral program
· …
God save the marketers! If you think that this is all available out of the box, then I will have to upset you – no it isn’t. You have to understand that some of these actions are mutually exclusive, some can be used only once and many other factors need to be considered. So, you have to put in effort and support all this yourself.
Let’s look at the next factor, analytics. One can talk about this for a long time and in-depth, because this topic is complex. First, we conditionally divide analytics into several levels:
· Products – funnels, experiments. Mixpanel copes very well here, but it can become very expensive, so now we are looking at self-hosted solutions
· Marketing – the cost of customer acquisition, conversions, average bill. Google Analytics does a good job for the time being, but good luck setting it up without the help of an expert
· The financial side is generally a separate consideration
Again, I repeat that this division is arbitrary, because all these data are closely related to each other and it makes no sense to consider them separately from each other. And here’s the situation, the payment services themselves provide only basic features, but they provide the ability to export, so then you can work with the raw data. There are many interesting external systems (e.g. Revealytics), but they also have hardcoded rules for calculating certain metrics, so you need to start maintaining certain calculations on your side. At the same time, the most stupid situation happens when you have a dozen systems and the numbers do not agree with each other. As the saying goes “happy debugging you bastards” (c)
In the end, 2 years ago, we came to the conclusion that we should enter all the data in AWS Redshift. Looker works on top of it and that allows you to visualize the data. You can hear how we came to this solution in this story by the leader of our analytics team, Vanya Zerina.
Now let’s talk about the most critical functionality of payment services, the recovery of customers whose payment did not go through on the day of billing. There can be many reasons why a payment has not gone through:
· No money in the account (most popular reason)
· Card canceled
· Card expired
· The card was stolen and blocked
· The bank thought there was a fraudulent transaction
· There was actually fraud
· The bank had maintenance
· And many many others
The main reasons for losing customers
As I wrote above, most of the services do not process payments themselves, but support one or more payment processors. Each of these processors has (if it has) its own individual code for each error, and then the payment service either sends them as is, or they provide their own message. For this reason we stopped using Stripe as in 90% of cases they gave a generic payment declined message and it was not clear what to do next. Why is it important to receive these codes? Because, depending on the error, the solution can be different.
First, we can divide the errors into hard failures (for example, the card is blocked/stolen) and soft failures (no money). This is so that don’t try to perform unnecessary transactions for a hard failure, so that we do not lose money on this and so we do not have problems with Visa/MC. But here there is also a nuance regarding exactly how the payment service classifies the error in one category or another. For example, PayPal has error number 10417. Transaction cannot complete — “Instruct the customer to retry the transaction using an alternative payment method from the customer’s PayPal wallet” or “The transaction did not complete with the customer’s selected payment method”. As we found out, it can mean either the payment method is unavailable or there are not enough funds in the account. Our previous default gateway defined this error as a hard failure. But after we reconfigured it, we began to recover many more people.
The second point is why you need to know the error code. Communication with the client depends on this. The more accurate the instructions on what a person needs to do, the higher the percentage of recovered payments will be. In our case, we were able to raise this number by about 18% after we started writing different text, and even for cases of first-time payments. Unfortunately, out of the box payment services do not do this, and so we built all the communication ourselves.
Well, now onto the last factor, which is recovery. It is very important to try to conduct a transaction several times after the initial attempt, as there is a very, very high chance that it will pass. We recover from about 85% of all failed payments using this mechanic. There are also several nuances:
· The United States have different approaches to paying wages. On the 1st day of the month, twice a month on Fridays, every week on Friday, and so on. We try to process payments in such a way as to fall on days close to those described, which increases the likelihood of a successful transaction
· Many banks do maintenance at night, so transactions are best done during the day
· Also, banks can think a transaction is fraud if it is carried out at a time when the client usually does not spend money
· There is a force deposit mechanism that allows you to withdraw money and take the account balance into a minus, but here you have to be careful, as it can only come from Visa/MC
As a rule, very few payment services have recovery mechanisms that take into account all this, so you either have to look for such a service, or do it yourself, or combine both, as we ended up doing.
Finally, let’s talk about payment processors. Having several makes sense if you:
· You have a large volume of traffic and want to optimize the transaction fees (how much money do you pay Visa/MC/… for a transaction; different processors have different contracts for different types of cards)
· It is important for you to have a backup processor if one does not work for some reason
· You work in several countries. In this case, different processors work differently with local banks and national methods of payment (for example, Vantiv works very well in the States, and Adyen works very well in Europe)
Often, only large subscription services integrate directly with processors, bypassing the gateway, and here’s why they do it:
· As a rule, each gateway has its own abstraction layer regarding working with subscriptions, discounts, customers, and others. If the service has complex logic, then at some point it already seriously limits the development of new functionality
· At some point, paying for gateway services becomes more expensive than developing and maintaining your own solution
· Direct integration provides great opportunities to use the functionality of the processors themselves, since the gateway can only do many things superficially
We have not yet reached the stage when we need our own solution, but in the future, in 2-3 years, we will need it. Again, we must understand that in this case we will be responsible for security, since we will have to undergo PCI certification and perform many other additional tasks, but it will be worth it.
About parcels and delivery
Okay, we’ve talked about payments, now let’s talk about parcels. As I wrote before, we give our customers a choice of what they want to receive. This distinguishes us from most subscription services, where there is no customization at all, or it is very simple (2-3 options, such as Dollar Shave Club). Many services now offer more choices, so they start to face the same challenges as us.
First, it is the selection of choices for clients. In this regard we created an analog of the Netflix queue, while they were still messing around with discs. Everything is very simple, there is a visual element that contains N cells for each future month. The client adds a product to the queue and after that they don’t even need to return to the site. As long as there is money on their card they will receive a parcel every month.
Basically, everything is quite simple, but let’s walk through it as we did above. First, the client’s choice must be fixed (we call it “freeze the queue”) a day before the payment is made, so that later on the person does not say that we sent them the wrong thing. That element must be removed as soon as the parcel is delivered to the addressee. But what if the person entered the wrong address and the package is returned? Or if the payment hasn’t gone through by the end of the month? What if the warehouse ran out of the perfume and new stock will not arrive soon? For these possibilities you need to think about your solutions.
Secondly, we don’t have just one subscription plan, but 46. Of course, a person does not see all these plans in the form of a list on the site, THAT would be madness. Some of these plans are upgrade options:
· Immediate payment for several months in advance
· A plan with 2-3 products
· A combination of the first two options
Then there are gift subscriptions and the ability to change the frequency of receiving a parcel to every two or three months, and a few more technical plans. Additionally, sometimes customers can have free months (for example, through a referral program) that people want to see. And now we can sit down and think about how to get this out of the box using Shopify. It isn’t possible.
Thirdly, not all perfumes are the same for all clients. There are limited edition perfumes (this means we cannot sell more than there are in stock), there are perfumes from a more expensive category (+$5/$10 for each such perfume selected for the current month). If your head is already spinning, don’t worry, ours are too. Thank God, there are integration and functional tests that allow you not to break such a complex system with one simple commit.
Let’s say everything is fine, the client has chosen a perfume, the payment was successful, and now the simplest thing is left, to send the parcel. Yes, but no. Everything is simple until there are parcels with several products.
Now, let’s take a step aside and talk a little about logistics in the USA. As a rule, most companies use the services of a logistics and warehouse partner, the so-called 3PL companies (3rd party logistic). They take on the responsibilities of receiving and storing goods at the warehouse, sending parcels, dealing with returns, and contracts with transport operators (carriers). Carriers are usually large companies (USPS, UPS, DHL, FedEx) and many other services in the category “last mile delivery”. Last mile delivery is the delivery of goods to the client from the last warehouse. As a rule, these are either small regional companies or USPS, which delivers everywhere in the United States. And there is also a special mail service that delivers parcels to military bases, embassies and so on. (We had several clients whose address pointed to service on an aircraft carrier. The sea also wants to smell good.)
So, 3PL companies use so-called WMS (warehouse management systems) in their work. These systems are designed to account for goods in the warehouse, receive and send goods, and all activities around them. Very often a WMS is part of a larger ERP system. An example of an ERP is the well-known SAP system. There are quite a lot of WMS systems on the market at the moment, most of them are well integrated with services such as Shopify or Magento. If you use them, then everything is great. But everything will fall apart once we start talking about subscriptions again, because there is the same factor related to billing day, when after all payments have gone through, a large number of orders must be transferred. This is where the problem comes in, as most of these systems are simply not designed for that kind of load.
The first few years we were able to work with external vendors, but as soon as we passed the mark of 200 thousand subscribers, everything collapsed with one of our regular partners and we had to urgently sort it out ourselves. All in all, it’s easy to ship packages. We take the goods, card, pack in a bubble mailer (plastic packaging with bubble wrap inside), paste the shipping label on it (a sticker indicating where to deliver, with what rate, tracking number, and so on), and then carry it to the post office. Profit! But everything is a little more complicated when dealing with 200 thousand parcels and even printing labels becomes an interesting task. Let’s analyze it.
Let’s start with what to print on. For this purpose, an industrial printer is used, in our case a Zebra ZT-510, capable of producing 2 labels per second, in theory. In practice, this is somewhere around 1.6. Simple math says that in about 35 hours we can handle it if we print on 1 printer without stopping. But as always, there are nuances:
· It is necessary to change the paper because there are usually 2000 sheets on a roll
· You must be able to separate orders by similarity, this is called batching
· Sometimes the printer chews on a sheet and printing needs to restarted
· Duplication cannot be allowed due to the operation above
· There is a need to clean the platen roller from time to time
· For speed, you need to use several printers, so you need to be able to manage printing in parallel
Moving on, where can you get the actual labels? That’s right, use a service that generates them. Here, of course, you can do direct integration, but we still do not like problems so much that we enjoy digging into SOAP, so we use the Shippo service and everything is more or less great.
This and much more gave the guys a pretty solid headache, but in a couple of days they were able to make a console solution and the printing started. It went something like this.
Now, two years later, we have both an application on Electron for managing printing, and our own WMS for managing the work in the warehouse, an algorithm for smart splitting into batches, and much more.
Afterword
As you can imagine, this is only a part of all the work that our team does, in addition to this there are:
· Mobile applications where our audience is most active
· Advanced analytics, including financial
· CRM (client relationship management) for our technical support, which was also written from scratch to support all our capabilities
· Personalization and recommendations
· Dozens of integrations with external services
· Integration with Oracle NetSuite, that was epic all by itself
· And many many others
Was it possible to do this with ready-made services using only the capabilities out of the box? Definitely not, we would still be waiting for improvements and customization. Would we be in a better or worse state in terms of subscriptions? I don’t know, but we would definitely be a different company.
So, answering the question in the title, as many as it will allow you to build a cool, tech business.
A day in the life of an EHS manager with Intenseye
Digital transformation is changing the face of manufacturing in almost every product category. Factories are increasingly digitising their infrastructure and processes to upskill their operators and improve business performance.
A key part of the manufacturing equation is the workforce that keeps facilities alive. So, what is digital transformation doing about employee health and safety (EHS)? Although EHS is still largely governed by manual processes, the best performing EHS leaders are driving the culture change in their facilities today through the use of novel technologies.
In recent years we have worked with and met a wide variety of EHS teams in industry. There is a particular segment of teams, Smart EHS teams, that are steps ahead of their peers in terms of delivering best-in-class operational EHS success. What sets Smart EHS teams apart is their willingness to source new technologies to overcome their daily challenges. This includes the use of video cameras to automate inspections, digital reporting services, control room dashboards to orchestrate their time and workforce all with the goal of minimizing EHS risk across the board.
On a daily basis, Smart EHS teams work closely with new technology integrators to bridge the gap between their IT teams, company management, and technology suppliers. They integrate new tools such as Intenseye on many different levels and adopt them quickly and broadly. Their agility is helping them to set up new workflows to reduce the time spent on a manual process, save money spent on absence time and insurance premiums significantly. As other divisions in production, now these EHS teams are driving a more efficient workplace with new advancing technologies.
To bring this topic to life, we wanted to give you a glimpse into the day of a Smart EHS team member who we’ll call Mark. Mark is an EHS manager in a manufacturing company. After implementing Intenseye into his operations, here is how his day looks like:
08:00 AM
Before the toolbox talk, Mark logs into the Intenseye Dashboard to see the safety alerts from the previous day. Intenseye suggests that he focuses on “Workplace Traffic Management ” because there was a very high number of critical Pedestrian Walkway Violations that the Intenseye system automatically detected yesterday.
08:30 AM
Mark hits the print out button on the Intenseye platform for some of the critical alerts and goes to the Toolbox talk location. He starts a discussion with his team to review the Workplace Traffic Management alerts from previous days and shows the printed alerts to employees. Employees feel highly engaged as they can see what happened in their facilities, and they start thinking about solutions. From the discussions during the Toolbox talk, Mark understands that the pedestrian walkway at the Warehouse is not well located and goes to the area to have a closer look.
09:00 AM
After he visits the warehouse, Mark confirms that the layout of the pedestrian walkway indeed wasn’t good enough. He logs into the Intenseye Platform, selects one of the alerts, and assigns a task to review the pedestrian walkway layout to Henry, Engineering Manager.
09:30 AM
Mark then starts to prepare for the weekly HSE meeting at 10:00 AM. He logs into the Intenseye platform to prepare his weekly slides. He goes to the Control Room tab and chooses which graphs and analysis he wants to share with the team. After that, he hits the export button, and his presentation is ready for his meeting. He feels like he deserved a good coffee now!
10:00 AM
Attendees listen to Mark very carefully and with lots of interest. They seem to be impressed with the information that Mark is presenting. At the end of the meeting, Mark shows the performance comparison of the locations in their facilities and the critical alerts about Workplace Traffic Management and Lifting Operations. Together they agree to hold a follow-up meeting tomorrow to identify the root causes of these critical alerts.
11:00 AM
Mark receives a notification from the Engineering Manager for the task he assigned to him earlier. The engineering Manager sends a proposal for the new layout, which could address the issues identified by employees in the morning Toolbox Talk. Mark accepts the solution, and he gets immediate updates on Intenseye Platform’s task management tool.
11:30 AM
The facility Manager informs Mark about a safety critical Working At Height activity that will start at 12:00 am. Mark logs into Intenseye platform and finds the camera for that location and sets his Working at Height rules so that Intenseye will monitor this event.
12:30 PM
Mark checks the alerts and he sees a critical Potential Dropped Object alert. He immediately calls the Area Supervisor to remove the hammer that was left outside the platform. Mark receives an Observation notification that says the hammer is removed and after 2 minutes the Area Supervisor calls Mark to say thanks for the heads up and to inform him that the hammer has been removed.
01:30 PM
Mark receives a notification on his mobile phone while he was having his lunch. Mark connects to the Intenseye live feed to find that man is down. He immediately calls the emergency services.
01:35 PM
A medical ambulance arrives at the facility and directly goes to the exact location that is sent by the Intenseye Platform. They take the injured person to the hospital as he is showing severe Heat Stress Case symptoms.
02:00 PM
Mark receives a call from the Injured Person who thanks him for the rapid medical Emergency Response, which prevented him from getting a heat stroke.
02:30 PM
Mark gets an observation report on the Intenseye Platform, which says that the working at height activity is completed and he receives a quick analysis of the alerts for that particular activity. He reviews and amends the Working at Height Risk Assessment as he didn’t include the dropped objects on his Risk Assessment earlier.
03:00 PM
Mark receives a call from his HSE Director to congratulate Mark for leading his facility to the highest Compliance Score amongst all other facilities of the Company. Mark’s Director also informs him about the Intenseye Award Ceremony that will take place next month as his facility is nominated among 100+ Companies for the Intenseye Excellence Awards. Mark’s facility reduced the alert frequency rates by 20% from last year, and its Safety Compliance Score moved up from 70 to 89. As a result, the business managed to reduce their insurance premiums by 10%.
03:30 PM
Mark visits the Intenseye Community Page to understand how the “Spill” use case can be set. He asks his question to the Community and one of the HSE Managers of another Company walks Mark through the setup process.
04:00 PM
Mark gets the automatically generated Daily HSE Report email from the Intenseye Platform. He shares some of the alerts with the Area Supervisors and assigns tasks for the corrective actions.
04:30 PM
Mark finishes his work and feels great. He had a very productive day, managed a worksite through Intenseye’s integrated cameras while keeping tabs on what was happening across his entire facility.
To learn more industry best practices from Intenseye and demo our platform, reach out to us at [email protected]
Forbes 30 Under 30 2021 includes alum from four ERA companies
We’re thrilled that the Forbes 30 Under 30 for 2021 included alum from four ERA companies! Here they are:
How to Measure and Predict Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) is the total revenue a customer generates for a business. It’s a simple formula — no fancy tools needed — which looks like this:
GML is the gross margin per lifespan (how much profit each customer provides in their lifespan),R is the monthly retention rate (inverse of the churn rate), and D is the monthly discount rate (or the opportunity cost, mainly consisting of inflation and risk).
That’s a mouthful, so let’s take an example: Netflix. Their gross margin is 39% while the average total customer revenue is around $465 ($10.82 per user per month, on average, times a whopping 43 months), and the GML is the product of these factors, or around $181. The monthly retention rate is about 99.25% (yes, that’s extremely high), and we can take the standard discount rate of 10%.
Plugging these values into the CLV formula, we get $181 * (0.9925/(1+0.1–0.9925) which is equal to a CLV of $1,683.
However, the CLV formula doesn’t tell us the impact of different attributes on component variables in that formula (like churn and customer spend), so simply knowing CLV doesn’t let us optimize for the future. It’s like calculating the fuel economy of a car, without knowing how to actually optimize it.
We can use a slightly different approach to model a customer’s transactions and predict what they’ll do in the future, taking into account variables like order value and churn rate. We can then see what drives sales and retention, allowing us to maximize CLV, based on this formula:
T is the average number of transactions per month, AOV is the average order value, AGM is the average gross margin, ALT is the average customer lifespan in months, and n is the number of clients for a given period.
Let’s use this Olist e-commerce dataset as an example of calculating CLV with this formula. First, we need to find the average number of transactions, T. For this, we look at the file “olist_orders_dataset.csv.”
In 2017, there were 45,101 transactions, and in 2018 there were 54,011 transactions. The average transactions for a one-year period is 49,556, or 4,130 per month. We exclude 2016 due to its low transaction volume.
We can find AOV, the Average Order Value, by merging the orders dataset (which has order IDs and dates) and the orders payment dataset (which has order IDs and transaction values) on their shared column, order ID. The mean transaction value in 2017 was $152.55 and in 2018 it was $155.31, so AOV is $153.93 (again, we’re not including orders in 2016).
The dataset doesn’t include the cost of sales, so we can’t precisely calculate the average gross margin, but Shopify’s median gross margin is 56%, so let’s use that as an estimate of Olist’s AGM.
Likely for privacy reasons, we don’t actually get real customer IDs. There’s the same number of customer IDs as order IDs, which would imply that there’s a 100% churn rate (since customer IDs don’t have more than one associated order ID), so instead we’ll assume that ALT (average customer lifespan in months) is 12 months, within the realm of a typical e-commerce company.
Now, we have the variables we need to calculate CLV.
Again, knowing CLV doesn’t tell us how to optimize it, so let’s dive deeper.
What Impacts CLV?
If we want to optimize CLV, we need to understand what drives churn and average order value. The Olist dataset doesn’t give us quite enough to work with, though we can use a synthetic Telco dataset to predict churn and analyze order values.
Let’s upload the Telco dataset to Apteo, and select “Churn” as the KPI to automatically find insights. Total charges has the biggest impact on churn, followed by the contract type.
Heading to the “Insights” tab, we can see that higher-cost and month-to-month contracts have a higher rate of churn, while lower-cost and yearly contracts have a lower rate of churn. Further, churn is higher with electronic checks as a payment method, as opposed to automated payment methods.
We can create another predictive model with “total_charges” as the KPI, using the attributes of gender, senior citizen, partner, and dependents. We can see that whether the customer has a partner is the biggest driver of total charges, which makes sense, given that couples will have greater needs and financial means than individuals.
Summary
To optimize CLV, you need to analyze its component variables. By understanding the attributes that drive retention and sales, we can then maximize CLV.
In the Telco example, one could minimize churn by prioritizing yearly contracts, lower-cost options, and automated payment methods, while maximizing order value by prioritizing sales leads with partners and dependents.
Author Frederik Bussler is the Founder of the Security Token Alliance. As a public speaker, he has presented for audiences including IBM, Nikkei, Slush Tokyo, and the Chinese government, and is featured in outlets including Forbes, Yahoo, Thrive Global, Hacker Noon, European Commission sites, and more. Recently, he represented the Alliance as a V20 delegate.
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