Starting an e-commerce business is easier than ever with a number of plug-and-play platforms like Shopify to alleviate heavy technical burdens. Starting a successful e-commerce business is a much more difficult task. It’s no longer a case of if you build, they will come. The most seasoned e-commerce operators recognize the importance of data analytics and how leveraging this data effectively drives sales and marketing through strategic customer acquisition, marketing mix, customer retention, social media spend, segmentation, and promotion strategy. Zenlytic makes uncovering valuable insights easier with its no-code analytics platform, built specifically for e-commerce and direct-to-consumer businesses. The platform makes it easy for operators and marketers alike to easily make data-driven decisions without technical expertise or the need to set up sophisticated queries. Zenlytic is currently in private beta and expects to go public within the next six months.
AlleyWatch caught up with CEO and Cofounder Ryan Janssen to learn more about how the data science consulting he was doing while pursuing his masters inspired the company, future plans, recent funding, and much, much more.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Zenlytics raised a $1m Pre-Seed led by Primary Venture Partners with participation from Company Ventures, Correlation Ventures, and a number of awesome angels.
Tell us about the product or service that Zenlytic offers.
Zenlytic is a no-code analytics tool for e-commerce and DTC businesses. We take all of the advanced questions you’d usually ask a data analyst, and help you answer them in seconds using machine learning.
We enable anyone to answer “why” and “how” rather than just “what.” For example, any dashboard can tell you that your sales went down 15% last week. Zenlytic will tell you the drop was because you changed your pricing on the “advanced mixing bowl” SKU in your Shopify.
What inspired the start of Zenlytic?
In grad school, my cofounder Paul and I started doing data science consulting to pay the bills.
We quickly realized that EVERYONE is being held back by the availability of self-serve analytics. Every e-commerce business could be acquiring and engaging with their customers in a very data-driven way, but most only have a vague idea of what’s working.
So, we set out to replace ourselves. We built an AI-driven product that empowers business users to answer deep questions about their sales and marketing.
How is Zenlytic different?
The problem with analytics tools is that they’re built for analysts.
We believe analytics tools need to be human-forward, not technology-forward. Zenlytic lets you ask meaningful, actionable questions instead of weird data queries.
And, we’re only for e-commerce & DTC. So we can focus on the biggest problems that DTC marketers think about. Things like CAC, LTV, conversion funnels, and cohort-driven analytics.
What market does Zenlytic target and how big is it?
I’ve always believed that a growing market is more important than a big market. Luckily DTC is both big AND growing!
Everyone’s seen that “10 years of e-commerce growth in 3 months” plot by now – that’s exactly what operating in this market feels like. There’s just excitement in the air and everyone’s buying stuff online.
What’s your business model?
We keep it simple. We charge a flat monthly SaaS rate for unlimited usage.
How has COVID-19 impacted the business?
We made the decision to go full-remote forever very early in the pandemic. Our center of gravity will always be NYC, but now we have some people everywhere. So far this has worked out great – the team is happy with the flexibility, and it opens up so many new opportunities for recruiting.
But COVID hasn’t impacted sales. Our users are exclusively e-commerce and DTC businesses, which are busy in these challenging times.
What was the funding process like?
Fast and furious. The venture market is red-hot right now and both sides want to move quickly.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
Our biggest challenge was definitely COVID-related: it’s not easy to start a ten-year partnership over Zoom. Even now, we still haven’t met most of our investors in person.
It goes both ways – it’s tough to portray ‘impressive visionary’ through a 1-second lag and blurry video. It’s also hard to get a sense of what kind of partner each investor would be, and how you would work together.
My advice would be to do twice as many sessions if you’re virtual. Instead of 3 coffees, do 6 Zooms. Putting in the time to build those relationships will pay dividends throughout the process and beyond.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
It’s funny. When we closed the round, we thought we had presented a pretty compelling product and business plan. Since then, we’ve changed or dropped half of those ideas. And we now realize that the airballs must have been obvious to everyone we were pitching.
So that means that the plan, the product, and the pitch weren’t that important to investors after all. They really did care more about the team than anything else.
It’s funny. When we closed the round, we thought we had presented a pretty compelling product and business plan. Since then, we’ve changed or dropped half of those ideas. And we now realize that the airballs must have been obvious to everyone we were pitching.
So that means that the plan, the product, and the pitch weren’t that important to investors after all. They really did care more about the team than anything else.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
In six months, we’ll have concluded our private beta and will hopefully have closed out the waitlist.
We’ll have launched a few important product features (my personal favorite is a dynamic feed that automatically tells you what you need to know about your business).
We’ll have another 1-2 team members, but our goal is to always stay lean as a team.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Ask yourselves if you even need a fresh injection of capital. Too many companies raise venture for the wrong reasons.
These days, it’s incredibly cost-effective to build a prototype, get in front of a few potential customers, and test product-market fit. A lot of people think they need capital for this stage, but they can usually bootstrap it.
So my advice would be: before even doing that fundraise, sense-check if there’s a way to achieve your immediate goals without a fundraise at all.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
I still can’t believe that technology can easily find the mating call of the Atlantic puffin, but can’t give you even basic analytics about your business.
Things are changing, though. The next five years will bring some dramatic new ways for us to become more data-driven. We’re seeing it now with the best-in-class companies – Amazon, Netflix, etc. And soon every business will be able to use data to really understand what’s going on. To make better decisions, and better actions.
What will this look like? Definitely easier to use. More self-serve. Probably natural language. Automated. Actionable.
Are we going to be a part of that? I sure hope so. We’re moving further in this direction with Zenlytic every day.
What’s your favorite outdoor dining restaurant in NYC
Katz’ Deli has actually improved its dining experience with outdoor seating! Now you can enjoy NYC’s best pastrami on a nice quiet LES street instead of sitting at those cramped, noisy tables inside.
