It’s that magic time of the year. The time of beach vacations, humid days, and the summer hackathon at RJMetrics. It seems like the hackathons have a slightly different air during the summer. Are we less serious? More willing to try the entirely offbeat? Whatever the cause, this particular hackathon brought out a range of projects ranging from the just-for-fun to the futuristic. Let’s start with the former.

The team gathered to listen to the presentations:

The just-for-fun projects

Team Potent Potables

Members: Sal, Alex K. Eric

Most of the time RJMetrics is used for things like tracking monthly revenue, calculating marketing ROI, or measuring average order values. But it’s an insanely flexible tool that can be used to answer a multitude of data question. When an RJMetrics employee Yammered a link to a massive Jeopardy data set, a few of our analysts were inspired.

Team Potent Potables converted the JSON file to .csv, uploaded it into RJMetrics, built a few derivatives, and got to work. Most actionable takeaway? The most common Jeopardy answer is “China”.

Team RJ Jams

Members: Anna K. Jenn, Kelly, Janessa, Drew

We’re a team of data nerds, but don’t let that fool you. The talents at RJMetrics expand well beyond the scope of analytics. Team RJ Jams tapped the singing talent that exists mostly unseen within the walls of RJMetrics. Data-driven parodies were written by the team and performed by mostly willing RJMetrics employees. Renditions included:

Lovin’ the Data Warehouse (Livin’ La Vida Loca), performed by Austin Lopez

She’s into segmentationn/ Cohorts and ROI/ She’s making good decisions/ Connecting Shopify

Insight in My Data (Genie in a Bottle), performed by Jake Stein

I feel like I’ve been locked up tight, for a century with no insight/ Waiting for someone to implement me/ Writing SQL queries and pivot tables all day/ But that don’t mean you grow revenue this way/ Baby, baby, baby

The record name is aptly named “I Like Big Data and I Cannot Lie.” No official release date has been announced.

The futuristic

RJMoracle

Members: Bill, Brian, Yiannis

Imagine a world where all you had to do was ask a question and the data appeared at your fingertips. No seriously, it’s like this. You say, “Hey Siri, what was my average customer lifetime value last month?” And you get your answer in a second.

Ok, so the demo didn’t work out quite that smoothly, this is the future afterall. Regardless, RJMoracle is exactly the kind of product that makes hackathons so fun, presenting all of us with a new way to think about what the product we’re building could be capable of.

Other future-thinking projects

Cloudy with a Chance of Dashboards built a hack that pulls weather data into RJMetrics. It has the potential to revolutionize how our companies send email promotions or invest money in ads. Just think, why would a sunglass company spend $3.75 to advertise on a cloudy day when the price is the same and revenue is higher on a sunny day?

Auger was out to find a new way to explore data in RJMetrics. The hack showed how we could add a layer to our new report builder that would allow clients to dig into data at the individual level.

Cluster it, while far from finished, took a stab at adding machine learning capabilities to RJMetrics.

But who won?

Bob tallying up the results:

And the winner is:

Team Labradata (Members: Bob, Lauren, Ben, Shaun, Marek, and Maya) took home the win. Labradata was a customer-facing project aiming to inject some fun into RJMetrics by “gamifying” the software. For example, build a chart after midnight and receive a gremlins badge.

How they’re planning to spend their winnings has not yet been determined.