MetaBase allows Spocket to save 60+ hours per month and avoid ad-hoc requests to the data engineering team
The Challenge: Spocket’s data team used to spend an average of 60 hours per month putting together the analytics that various teams needed. To add to the problem, there were no data visualization tools, and we weren’t able to get a daily, weekly, or monthly view of the data without having to build extra graphs and involve the data engineering team.
The Solution: We found out about Metabase and immediately liked how intuitive its user interface was, along with its affordable pricing and intelligent access control.
The Results: Metabase enabled our non-technical team members to easily explore and analyze data without asking for the data team’s help.
What is Spocket?
Spocket.co is an online marketplace that allows e-commerce merchants to easily start dropshipping top products from US and EU suppliers. Spocket‘s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to build and scale their businesses by eliminating inventory distortions. It provides seamless integration to all the major eCommerce sites, such as Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and more, allowing retailers to enjoy automated product syncing and order fulfillment for their dropshipping businesses.
The Challenge
Because of its complex data environment, our team was struggling to make business decisions with confidence based on comprehensive data analytics. We did not have a single source of truth to manage diverse data across various systems. Pulling together all the required data analytics for business decisions was a tedious and time-consuming process. In addition, managing access controls for confidential data was next to impossible.
As a Director of Product at Spocket, my responsibility was to keep an eye on the business's health in one centralized place. I needed to be able to view key metrics, such as Customer Churn, Customer Acquisition, Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), and Lifetime Value (LTV) on a daily basis to have a good grasp of company health and immediately spot any deviations in data. In addition, the executive team was looking to make data-driven decisions without running into inconsistencies. However, the current data was inconsistent. This impeded the team’s ability to make informed decisions and prevented the finance team from predicting the company’s performance.
Metabase Implementation
Initially, Spocket’s key stakeholders all came to a decision on which key metrics would be used to monitor business performance. This way, everyone was aligned on the definition of the single source of truth. Next, we shortlisted the tools that could help them to efficiently achieve their goals. We wanted to create SaaS metrics dashboards that would allow each stakeholder to review their metrics daily and report to the executive team.
One of the data science experts from Twitter recommended Metabase to me as a part of our networking conversation. After reviewing multiple tools, I decided to use Metabase based on the following factors.
- Ease of use as compared to other data visualization tools
- Affordable pricing
- Ease of organizing and maintaining graphs and dashboards
- Ease of setting up access control
The Spocket data team stored data in AWS RedShift and in Segment, a customer data platform. It could then be pushed to Metabase for visualization using a data pipeline that uses lambdas.
Spocket’s executive team was interested in product upgrade data, particularly in the context of user acquisition and retention. Meanwhile, the finance team was interested in financial data such as MRR, LTV, and ARPU. The operations team was keen to visualize the number of product listings, suppliers, and order volume. With Metabase, we were able to create a SaaS metrics folder for different user journeys, such as signups, trials, churns, and more. We viewed data daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly for all day-to-day troubleshooting and long-term business strategizing. Using Metabase’s access control management, it was easy to implement controls to ensure that each department was able to access the data analytics relevant to them. Spocket’s team was able to share data with individual team members without jeopardizing or exposing other data points. In addition, we could use simple SQL to slice and dice the data and answer any questions that stakeholders had without spending too much time building reports.
“With Metabase, we are able to determine upgrade funnel performance and discover a payment method with high involuntary churn. With this information, we are able to find out intelligent A/B testing experiments to improve our retention.” — Shreyas Sali, Director of Product and Data at Spocket.co
The Results
Metabase has become a single source of truth for Spocket’s stakeholders, who can now view the health of their business at any point in time. Spocket’s product team has been able to use these dashboards to review declines in any key metrics and prioritize product features accordingly. All this has allowed Spocket’s executive team to increase their understanding of the current business performance and enhance their confidence to prioritize new initiatives.
Originally published at https://www.metabase.com.
