The past year here at RJMetrics has been an amazing experience. Our vision—changing the way businesses make data-driven decisions—is becoming more of a reality every day.
Today, we’re proud to announce a new partner on our journey: Trinity Ventures. Trinity has led a $6.25M Series A investment in RJMetrics and Karan Mehandru has joined our Board of Directors. We’ve known Trinity and Karan for quite some time, and we couldn’t be more excited about adding their passion, vision, and expertise to the RJMetrics team.
You can read more about the financing on TechCrunch, Technically Philly, and PRWeb, so I’ll spare you the boilerplate here. Instead, I would like to take a minute to talk about what this news means for you, our customers.
Ever since our bootstrapped beginnings, customers have been the lifeblood of RJMetrics. This customer-centric philosophy is wired into our DNA, and it will continue to permeate our work as we put this new investment to use.
In just the past few months, we’ve rolled out a new dashboard user experience, a revamped chart builder, new ways to get your data into and out of our data warehouse, and a world-class customer success team.
This pace of innovation, which was bolstered by a small seed round last year, will now accelerate even further. Stay tuned for game-changing enhancements and, as always, please don’t be shy if you have feature suggestions.
Thank you so much for your continued support as we move into this exciting new chapter.
Not too long ago, Bob and I were were two guys with no customers and no product working out of an attic. The first years are tough, and companies rely on the advice and support of startup communities to make it through.
The best part of our job at RJMetrics is the chance to help new entrepreneurs succeed. That’s why we’re so excited to announce our partnership with 21212, Brazil’s premier digital startup accelerator. Through this partnership, every company in 21212 will have access to the same level of business intelligence that the industry’s leading companies use to power their decisions.
From the 21212 blog:
After completing our first two acceleration programs, and now in our third, we have come to realize the importance of data analysis in the entrepreneurial process. Starting a business is all about asking, and answering, a growing list of questions. What do my customers want from me? How much are they willing to pay? Where can I find them? Answering these questions successfully determines whether a fledgling venture will succeed or fail. And the only way to come up with answers is to dig into your data.
We couldn’t have said it better ourselves. Good luck to everyone in 21212′s third class, and we’re looking forward to helping you grow.
It’s been a busy new year at RJMetrics! Here’s some of what’s been happening behind the scenes:
Our co-founders Jake and Bob just returned from a trip to San Francisco, where they attended an investor’s CEO conference and visited with several of our wonderful clients.
Our staff is growing! Our new Director of Marketing starts Monday, a new developer has just signed on, and we’ve accepted two Drexel co-ops for the summer session.
Our CEO Bob had another popular guest post in TechCrunch last week, which you can read here.
Bob is also featured in the new book “Hacking PR” by Sean Blanda. You can learn more about the book here (and use code RJMETRICS for 20% off).
This Thursday at Noon, we will kick off our second seasonal RJMetrics Hackathon.
Our previous hackathon was an enormous success. It caused major disruption in our development pipeline. Many of that hackathon’s projects are currently being beta tested and will hit our production codebase soon.
It also spawned such live features as:
QueryMongo.com, which topped Hacker News and helps dozens of coders (including our team members and customers) every day.
A snazzy new sales video, which is being A/B tested on our homepage.
The winning team will be given $500, with the caveat that they must SPEND IT ALL IN ONE NIGHT. You can pick any night you want and spend it however you want, but that money has to be gone by the time the sun comes up. Winners are encouraged to document their shenanigans.
Taking Suggestions
Got a suggestion for something our team should take on at the Hackathon? Let us know by emailing support@rjmetrics.com with your suggestions. They will be passed on to our entire team.
A significant part of this job will be analyzing different marketing channels and strategies to determine best fit and ROI. Day to day responsibilities will include content marketing, quantitative data analysis, paid advertising, funnel optimization, and partner management.
We want this person to be comfortable contributing on all aspects of marketing-related projects and able to work autonomously.
I’m happy to announce that RJMetrics has released a free course on ecommerce metrics. This course collects some of the most valuable things we’ve learned from working with hundreds of ecommerce businessses over the past four years. This is the first time we’ve consolidated and curated all of this information in one place. Some of the topics covered are:
Data storage best practices
How to choose your metrics
The best process for communicating metrics
Improving valuation and accelerating fundraising using metrics
Maintaining consistent definitions
Case studies of successful companies
Benchmark report on metrics across ecommerce
This course is delivered as a series of emails over 30 days, and many of the emails have links to additional resources for further learning. You can opt out at any time. Sign up for for our course on ecommerce metrics today.
This past weekend, we had one of the most successful events in our company’s history: 16 team members participated in a 24-hour Hackathon. With a massive trophy and a fancy steak dinner on the line, everybody came to win.
The Rules
This was our first Hackathon, so we asked our friends at other startups about their own best practices. We settled on the rules below.
Logistics:
Everyone in the company is encouraged to participate, but it’s not mandatory for anyone.
All normal work except for time sensitive customer support should stop for participants.
The event kicks off at noon on Friday and ends with “pencils down” at noon sharp on Saturday. Demos and voting will immediately follow.
Hackathon projects can be literally anything related to the company in some way. Code, prose, images, audio, video, data analyses, web pages, physical objects and anything else are OK.
Participants can brainstorm ideas and form teams at any time between the announcement and the start of the Hackathon. The definitive teams need to be documented no later than one hour after the start of the Hackathon.
Teams can be any size with any mix of company role.
Normal testing/feedback/QA/review rules are not mandatory for work done during the Hackathon.
Hackathon projects might end up being re-written, changed, becoming a core part of what we do, or being completely discarded after the Hackathon.
Open source technology may be used as a component of your project.
Presentations and Voting:
Demos take place at the end. Each team gets up to 5 minutes for a demonstration and up to 5 minutes for questions. Presentation order will be randomly drawn.
Vote for the team that you feel generated the most value for RJMetrics during the time of the Hackathon. If most of the work was done ahead of time, but the final 5 percent was done during the Hackathon, they get 5 percent of the credit.
All Hackathon participants will cast votes in the style of instant runoff voting, but they cannot vote for their own team.
The winning team get their names on a trophy and a $300 gift card to Del Friscos. The trophy will circulate among the desks of the winners until the next Hackathon, á la the Stanley Cup.
Ample food was always in supply
The Projects
In the end, eight submissions were presented. Our customers should keep an eye out for some of these making their way into our product in the coming weeks.
Adding medians and percentiles to our dashboards: medians aren’t native functionality in most SQL languages, which required the implementation of special stored procedures to make them work.
Automated Training: a team used Kera.io to build interactive online tutorials in which new users can learn by manipulating their own dashboard environments.
Nate and Xiao hammering out the user community project
User Community: a tightly-integrated online community for user discussions and sharing best practices.
Responsive iPad UI: a new user interface for our dashboards that allows iPad users to have an even easier navigation experience in our product.
More Data Sources: integration with Zapier to allow us to easily connect with third party APIs like Shopify, Salesforce.com and Zendesk.
New Logo: an impressive prototype for a new RJMetrics logo.
MySQL to MongoDB Query Translator: a tool to translate a traditional MySQL query into its eqivalent in MongoDB.
Red Bull gives Rohan wings
The Results
Our main conclusion from this event: Hackathons are awesome. The time flew by, we all had tons of fun and the output was extremely impressive. It reaffirmed to everyone that there really are no weak links on this team– everyone was a real competitor.
The crew enjoys the final presentations
The Query Translator and iPad UI teams took home first and second place, and both will be enjoying steaks at Del Frisco’s soon.
As for the rest of the crew, an anonymous follow-up survey revealed that over 90 percent of participants would be “extremely likely” to participate in another Hackathon. At this rate, our next one may be just around the corner.
I’m proud to announce that RJMetrics is now a recommended vendor on Start2Cloud, a research firm that evaluates cloud solutions for B2B software.
Jan Kocfelda, Start2Cloud’s head of business intelligence, had this to say about RJMetrics:
We at Start2Cloud love RJMetrics. It is one of the best BI applications out there, and they know that great analytics is not only about excellent software but skills and experience in the field are crucial too. Pursuing this notion, RJMetrics provides free implementation and training on top of every package offered. RJMetrics also manages your data warehouse continuously and helps with any additional adjustments. There is no reason we wouldn’t recommend RJMetrics for any business looking for a great BI solution.
Monica Mehta, reporter for BusinessWeek and frequent contributor to Fox News, MSNBC, and ABC news, just published a new book titled The Entrepreneurial Instinct. The book features interviews with successful entrepreneurs and discusses the circumstances and the thought processes that drove them to start their companies.
Beyond the stories, Mehta also dives into the psychology and neurochemistry of entrepreneurship and risk taking. She analyzes the personality traits that correlate with and enable entrepreneurship. Mehta examines the crucial role of the brain chemical dopamine, and she explains how its interacts with different parts of the brain during the risk taking decision process.
Finally, she goes into detail on practical exercises and personal finance tactics that can help people get comfortable with the risk, uncertainty, and anxiety that come along with the plunge into a new venture.
Bob and I were interviewed for this book, and we’re thrilled to be a part of it. You can read about us in chapter 10, “Finding Inspiration,” on page 124. Get your copy of The Entrepreneurial Instinct today, I highly recommend it.
Lots of new changes are on their way for us in September. Take a look at what we’re doing:
Product Updates:
We now support stacked bar charts for MultiSeries data.
We’ve released better handling of non-date category names on our charts.
We’ve increased internationalization support via continued UTF-8 compatibility efforts.
Standard implementations now include e-mail summaries and a new executive dashboard.
We are testing a guided video tour for new users, to help you better get to know our product and what it can do for your team.
Company News:
Our blog is in the process of being migrated to http://blog.rjmetrics.com/. Expect a substantial appearance upgrade.
What’s Next:
Don’t forget to come say hi to us at shop.org in Denver, Colorado next week. More information about the summit can be found here. We’ll be at booth 561.
