The team consists of cofounders Jeremy Levy and Andrew Weinreich and Indicative is their third startup together.
Indicative is a web and mobile analytics platform for making decisions – no coding required. After integrating with Indicative, every interaction a user has with a web or mobile application is automatically sent to Indicative’s cloud-based service. Businesses then have access to a suite of powerful tools to analyze their data, all from within their web browser. Using Indicative, businesses can conduct sophisticated analysis in seconds, without needing to know any SQL, write or code, or setup and maintain a data warehouse.
Simple. Smart.
The idea arose out of pain points they hit while working on their first two startups – both of which were acquired by larger companies.
“There is tremendous opportunity in the market for an analytics platform that enables both technical and non-technical users to easily ask questions and get answers from their data,” said Levy, who is the company’s CEO. “Since our launch in mid-September, we have heard from many new customers that our platform is a breath of fresh air – intuitive and easy to use, but still incredibly powerful and flexible to match their level of needs.”
Levy fills us in on the details on what he and Weinreich plan to do to make it three hits in a row.
Read on and learn.
Who were your investors?
Acadia Woods Partners led the round, with participation from Bertelsmann Digital Media Investments, Jonah Goodhart, Matthew Grodin, Brett Gough, Nils Johnson, Jamie Knall, David Reich, John Rigos, David Rose and Eduardo Vivas.
Tell us about your product or service.
Indicative is a cloud based, self-service analytics platform with simple yet powerful tools that improve customer acquisition, conversion and retention. Using Indicative, web and mobile businesses can leverage data to generate simple answers to their hardest analytical questions.
New companies often arise out of a pain point. What was the pain point for you?
The story of Indicative begins almost ten years ago, when I co-founded my first company, MeetMoi, alongside Andrew Weinreich. We were in the online dating space,. We looked at every analytics solution in the market and came away dissatisfied. There just wasn’t a solution out there that had the analytical power we needed, while still being easy to use for non-technical users. To be able to do any sort of practical analysis, you either needed to know SQL or write code – a complete deal-breaker for many potential users. Plus, pricing was misaligned with the needs of growing companies. We ended up building our own solution from scratch – a painful experience and a lot of investment in development time that wasn’t spent on our core business. We went through an almost identical process at the second company Andrew and I co-founded – Xtify, an enterprise software company that had completely different needs than MeetMoi.
We realized that while there were dozens of potential options out there for analytics, none of them addressed the core problem – providing actionable intelligence to all users in a simple way, at a price that scaled with business growth.
How is it different?
Indicative differs from everyone else in the analytics space in three key ways:
1) It has zero learning curve. It has a simple but powerful drag-and-drop interface, and no one ever has to touch SQL or any other complicated query languages.
2) There is unlimited analysis depth – other solutions limit the amount of drill-down capability because of how they are built, while Indicative has a novel architecture that dramatically improves performance.
3) Indicative is priced on a per-user basis. This allows customers to add unlimited events for their users, and track everything needed to optimize their business, without having to worry about their costs increasing overnight.
What market you are targeting and how big is it?
Business analytics is a $40-$50 billion dollar market currently, and we actually think it could be double or triple that in the long run. Many businesses either can’t afford big analytics solutions, or are limited in their adoption due to complexity. We’re targeting the millions of businesses that are performance-based and care about optimizing their marketing and product, but don’t want to spend their time writing complex SQL or code and maintaining a data warehouse.
What’s your business model?
We have a subscription-based pricing model that scales directly with the number of monthly users our clients have. Our pricing is designed to be simple and affordable, and we have a very generous free plan for startups.
What was the funding process like?
We focused on venture firms and angels that could add value to the business. They were either leaders in the digital community and/or well-versed in analytics and really understood the vision of what we are building.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
We were actually quite fortunate to be able to have repeat investors who backed us multiple times before. We’ve built great relationships with them, they believe in us and were able to make great introductions. All our investors are first or second degree connections.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Typically when you raise capital, you’re selling a future vision with a minimum viable product. With Indicative, we’ve already built a best in class product with real customers – it’s a very different type of conversation.
Additionally, our investors really believe in the team – we have an incredible amount of technical talent, many of whom have been working together for years. Our investors are extremely comfortable that we can continue to build world-class technology.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
We just launched our self-service platform, and are looking to rapidly expand our customer base. We’ve got a lot of exciting features and functionality coming out in the next few months as well.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Understand that raising capital is a process, not an event. Identify milestones you plan to hit, tell potential investors what they are, and demonstrate achievement of them along the way. Good investors are in it for the long haul and understand that relationships are not build overnight.
This is the third startup with your co-founder (Andrew Weinreich). What’s the key to a successful business partnership?
Mutual trust is the foundation. On top of that, you have to share the same values, vision, and work ethic to be able to weather the inevitable ups and downs together.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We want to change the way people think about their analytics provider. A lot of people are unhappy with the limited capabilities, complexity, and poor customer service of existing vendors. Our goal is to delight customers with a product that is a joy to use and support that is unheard of in this space.
What’s your favorite NY craft beer?
I’m a big fan of Ommegang, though I’ve also got a soft spot for Six Point. However with the New York Marathon coming up, I’m not drinking much of either right now.
