Posted Oct 31, 2014 by 

A team of early Grooveshark employees who left the company a couple of years ago to pursue their own startup ambitions have raised a little under a million for Tandem, a service that helps e-commerce companies better understand their customers shopping behavior and interests by combining analytics data, surveys and sales information.

Explains co-founder and CEO Isaac Moredock, previously Chief Revenue Officer at Grooveshark, Tandem was started because they realized companies had a hard time making sense of all the different siloed information and it compiled together in order to better understand who their customers really were.

The idea came about after experiencing similar struggles while at their former company.

“Being at company like Grooveshark where we had a large engineering team, we were always working together on understanding who is the user and what drives people to pay for our service,” says Moredock. “We’d run a survey, and that would be disconnected from the actual behavior of the user.” It was also difficult to then match that behavior up with what those customers were actually buying, he says. “We couldn’t get past the first dimension of data on a customer easily.”

The team has been iterating on the concept since they left in 2012, and first launched the service into private beta testing with a small number of customers this summer. Most of the testers are e-commerce companies who sell one or two products directly, while others are those who operate more of an online storefront. The best fit for Tandem, the company believes, are the medium-sized companies with around 100,000 customers.

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To get started, e-commerce companies link their online account at Shopify, Bigcommerce, Magenta or something similar, and Tandem’s service will sync all their historical sales information, including user contact information, to its service. This data is displayed in an online dashboard. Tandem will then begin sending the company’s customers its “persona” surveys to begin bucketing customers in various groups – like budget shoppers, those who shop “green,” etc.

These surveys are sent out via email and include some sort of promotional offer – like a discount on a future purchase, for example – in order to encourage responses.

As Tandem learns more about the individual shoppers, it integrates those learnings into its dashboard, showing retailers metrics including its customer lifetime value model which lets you drill down into various segments, like high-value customers. Here, retailers can see detailed metrics like when customers were added, when the group bought, how many products were sold, what percentage of the group fell into which persona grouping, and more.

 

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“What’s really unique is that all of this information has an email address attached to it,” notes Moredock. “You can actually target those people that you’re looking at right there with a survey.” So, for example, if you’re wondering why you may have gotten a spike from a certain group of shoppers, you can quickly send out a survey and just ask.

“When you have a question that these charts can’t answer, there’s a way to answer it,” Moredock says.

In the future, the longer-term goal is to dig into more types of behavioral metrics, run different types of surveys, and simplify the overall analysis for the e-commerce companies. On that latter front, this would include the addition of more actionable insights that can explain exactly how to react to the data presented to the companies about their customers, including by persona grouping.

Tandem, which competes with other analytics engines, survey companies like SurveyMonkey, and to some extent even large consulting research firms like Nielsen, is still too young to offer up an extensive amount of data related to its own customer successes, but it has a few case studies that seem promising. In one, for instance, the retailer was able to decrease its marketing spend by half, and, using Tandem’s product, increase revenue by 20%-30% month-over-month.

At launch, the pricing for Tandem starts at $200/month for businesses with under 20,000 customers, then increases to $595/month for up to 100,000 customers. Beyond that, custom pricing is available. Sign up for beta access is here.

Based in Orlando, Tandem is a team of nine with $950K in funding from The Institute for Commercialization of Public Research ($300K), and other angel investors including Launa Stayer (Johnsonville Sausage).