Spocket saves over 60 hours per month and avoids ad-hoc requests of their data team.

The Challenge: Spocket’s data team was spending 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 they weren’t able to view the data in daily, weekly or monthly views without having to build extra graphs.

The Solution: They found out about Metabase from one of the data scientists on Twitter. They liked how intuitive the Metabase user interface was, along with its affordable pricing and thoughtful access control.

The Results: Metabase enabled their non-technical team members to easily question and explore their data without the need to ask the data team for help.

"With Metabase we are able to identify how our upgrade funnel is performing and which payment method is having high involuntary churn. With this information we are able to identify intelligent A/B testing experiments to improve our retention. "

Shreyas Sali
Director of Product and Data at Spocket

Spocket’s mission is to empower entrepreneurs to build and scale their businesses by eliminating inventory distortions. Spocket provides seamless integration to all the major eCommerce sites such as Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, and more, allowing retailers to enjoy automated product synching and order fulfillment for their dropshipping businesses.

Why Metabase

Because of its complex data environment, the Spocket team found itself struggling to make business decisions with confidence based on comprehensive data analytics. They 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.

For their Director of Product & Data Analytics, Shreyas Sali, it was crucial to keep an eye on the health of the business in one centralized place. He 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 spot any deviations in data right away.

In addition, Spocket’s executive team needed to be able to make data-driven decisions without running into inconsistent, contradictory data that erodes confidence in the numbers and impedes the ability to review current performance as well as forecast the future. Spocket’s key stakeholders all came to an agreement on which key metrics would be used to monitor business performance. This way, everyone was aligned with their definition of the single source of truth.

Next, they shortlisted the tools that could help them to achieve goals efficiently. They wanted to create SaaS metrics dashboards that will allow each stakeholder to review their metrics on a daily basis and report to the executive team. One of the data science experts from Twitter recommended Metabase to Shreyas as a part of their conversation.

The Spocket team chose Metabase because of these factors:

• Ease of use as compared to other data visualization tools;
• Affordable pricing;
• A convenient way of organizing and maintaining graphs and dashboards;
• Easy to set up access control;

The data

They store data in AWS RedShift and a customer data platform such as Segment, with a pipeline that uses lambdas to push this data to Metabase for data visualization.

The Spocket team is interested in product upgrade data, particularly in the context of user acquisition and retention. Metabase also provides them with visibility of financial data such as MRR, LTV, and ARPU.

How Spocket team uses Metabase

With Metabase, they created a SaaS metrics folder for different user journey stages such as signups, trials, churns, and more. They view their data on a daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis for all their day-to-day troubleshooting and long-term business strategies.

Using Metabase’s access control management, it was easy for them to implement controls to ensure that each department is able to access only the data analytics relevant to them. Spocket’s team is able to share data they need without jeopardizing the confidentiality of other data.

In addition, they were able to use simple SQL to slice and dice the data and answer any questions that stakeholders may have without spending too much time building reports.

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 is now able to use these dashboards effectively to review declines in any key metrics and prioritize product features accordingly.

All this allows Spocket’s executive team to increase their ability to understand the current performance of the business or to enhance their confidence to jump into new initiatives without taking a leap in the day.