Nick Franklin is the founder of SaaS metrics platform, ChartMogul, and the man who led Zendesk through their expansion into Europe and then Asia.
We caught up with Nick recently to find out what he thinks about the future of metrics…
“Not much has been done with AI yet” says Nick. “Most analytics solutions, ours included, do fairly basic maths on data sets, building up queries, segmenting data and doing calculations to give you the insights that you need.”
What analytics platforms aren’t currently offering, Nick says, is some sort of “semi-intelligent agent to dig through data and pull things out for you… At some point, you could be able to ask the computer a sophisticated question” he muses, “not even a question with a yes or no answer, but a question like, where should we be investing right now in our business, or is there some kind of clue in the data that we have missed.”
A more natural user interface
Currently, platforms like ChartMogul are allowing customers to ask questions like “what is our customer churn rate for companies that pay over 100 dollars or less than 100 dollars” says Nick. “You do that in ChartMogul by clicking on a few buttons and it gives you a graph of the churn rate in those parameters. That’s a UI [user interface]”.
One possibility for the future of metrics, says Nick, could be platforms where the user interface “becomes natural language so you can ask a question in the same way you can ask Siri a question.”
While the Siri-style interface is potentially possible, Nick says the backend is essentially the same. “Once it’s been translated from a natural language question into a computer query, it’s still kind of the same, it’s doing standard database querying and this kind of thing on the backend.”
Intelligent AI
Another future says Nick would be being able to “ask vaguer questions over time.” Perhaps, he says, in the future, we might not even have to ask questions of our analytics software. “Perhaps you won’t even need to ask questions, the software will just find stuff for you [alert you to data] that you really need to look at.”
However the future looks, Nick predicts that “platforms will be more proactive.”
The future for ChartMogul
For now, ChartMogul remain focused on one specific goal – finding out “how subscription businesses can get value out of their data.”
“A lot of businesses generate a lot of data through their customers using their product” says Nick… “it’s hard and expensive making use of that data. It’s a lot of work, it might cost you a lot of money, or a lot of time, or both, and then at the end of it you might not get particularly great insights. With our product we’re trying to make it really, really easy for any subscription business to press a few buttons and get a tonne of insight and a bunch of value in a very short space of time without too much work.”
For Nick, the first challenge is making business intelligence truly useful. “We’re trying to democratise business intelligent software so any business can use it and get value out of their data.”
“We’re never able to build things as fast as we come up with them” says Nick, but “we’re working on things like being able to intelligently do revenue projection… I hope that we are the future of analytics.”
For Nick, the future is “easy and straightforward”. In the future, Nick wants “anyone to get value out of their data and answer questions of that data without too much time or too much work.”
For Nick, the future of analytics is simplicity.
If you want to build a better SaaS business, check out chartmogul.com. You can get $30/month off ChartMogul for 12 months with #GetStarted.
If you want to discuss your startup or product idea, get in touch with Simpleweb today.
If you’d like to discuss your startup or project, get in touch with Simpleweb today.
