Companies are increasingly looking at product led growth, where the product helps drive market expansion. If you’re giving the people what they want, they will spend more money, or so the theory goes, but how do you actually measure progress?
That’s where an early stage startup called Loops comes in. It announced a $14 million seed, a hefty amount by today’s standards, to help companies look at a variety of data sources and answer specific questions about how they are measuring up.
Company co-founder and CEO Tom Laufer says that he led a similar operation at Google before starting his company, and he saw smaller companies without Google’s resources, struggling to pull the data together to understand how well they were doing against their product goals.
“So many [product-led growth] enterprises today struggle to make data-driven decisions because they face torrents of data [and struggle to turn that into] real insights and real opportunities,” Laufer told TechCrunch.
He says this isn’t a dashboard with lines going up and down. Instead it’s a solution that offers very specific suggestions designed to answer individual questions and improve things like conversion, retention, engagement and monetization.
Loops connects to various data sources, and using machine learning models, bring back answers to the product team about how to improve their metrics based on the data that Loops finds — and importantly they are able to do this without a team of data scientists to pull the data together.
And this was a key reason that Ariel Tseitlin, partner at lead investor Scale Venture Partners was attracted to the company.
“Loops gives you the ability to essentially package up those insights in a way that is repeatable and automated without actually having to incur the expense of [building a data science team]. So there’s a real powerful cost savings element there as well,” he said.
The startup currently has around 20 people with plans to add more with the new funding, which closed recently. As he grows his workforce, Laufer says building a diverse company is a key factor for him. “We are literally doubling down on diversity including minorities and not just because it’s the right thing to do, it protects the future of the company by creating better brainstorming, better collaboration,” he said.
Today’s round was led by Scale Venture Partners with participation from Cardumen Capital and a host of industry angels.
As product-led growth expands, Loops digs into the data to track key metrics by Ron Miller originally published on TechCrunch
