2 Years, 2 Pivots. How We Launched An Open Source Data Framework: Part 2
HelpChat and Haptik are having a sword fight. In part 1, we had bailed on the consumer fight!
E-commerce, The Indian Goldrush
E-commerce had exploded in India. Flipkart had raised billions. Amazon turned the heat on. There were numerous investments in e-commerce startups such as Limeroad, Itokri, Lenskart, Policy Bazaar etc.
We saw an opportunity there. E-commerce platforms are in tearing hurry to reach their customers, current and prospective.
They use digital marketing to reach out to them. They spend millions on their digital marketing efforts.
Digital Marketing Campaigns Are So Old World
E-commerce rely on two things to get users.
One, digital campaigns. It’s about endless mails, blogs, social media updates and ads.
Two, feeds, when they land on their homepage.
It’s not changed in the past ten years. We could change it.
Automating Marketing
Why not use the engine which powered AAHIT. It’s core job is to understand personality, intent and send relevant information.
What if this message went as a campaign, instead of generic mail to a million users.
Personalization is the key.
What if each user has a personal feed.
Same can be true for in app notifications.
Octomatic Is Born:
We built a marketing automation widgets.
It did three things.
- Targeted push notifications.
2. Personalized feeds
3. Enhanced engagement (via chat)
Our aim was to target the "segment of one".
Chicken & Egg Problem: No Data For Personalization
Brands and companies asked for proofs upfront. We could not do that.
There was no historical data. We required it to train the engine.
Most companies had not stored their raw historical data. They relied on hazy analytics data to run campaigns.
Pivot No. 2: Octo.ai
A good marketing automation requires structured historical data. Market has automation solutions. But, it does not have raw data capturing and structuring solutions.
We had already built a data framework for our chat bot engine.
Bingo!
We saw a clear opportunity.
We Made It Open Source
Speed is everything.
We wanted more people to adopt. So, we pushed an open source framework.
Anyone with raw data can use our intelligent components. They are plug and play.
It’s time to look beyond basic heuristics and segmentation.
A New Future: Octo.ai is an Enterprise Open Source Company
We at Octo.ai have open sourced the plumbing required for analytics, marketing automation, business intelligence, IoT, etc.
The application are limitless, lets build out the ecosystem where more people can build a new class of business without know more about iOS, Android, HTML5, Kafka, and use the data straight out.
We are now an enterprise open source company helping enterprises collect their analytics data and help them supercharge their analytics and marketing!
