We met up with founders of GPredictive. GPredictive ´s mission is to provide customers with solutions that make decisions based upon data as easy as possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7aqZX8kFBXU
Who are you and what are you doing?
We are G-Predictive, a big data start-up. We want to give access to everyone to the big data driven decision making processes. To widely distribute this and make it available to everyone is our mission.
How did you come up with the idea?
Our company started in 2009 as a consultancy company to aide large companies and corporations in analytical questions. In 2010, two of the founders were finishing one last model, one last prediction, one last prognosis, one last forecast and thought to themselves ‘there has to be a better way to do this.’ That was the catalyst for us where we realized we need to change something about our business’ philosophy.
Then the idea came to develop a product. The situation, when we came to businesses tasked as consultants, was that we were often confronted with statistical software – which involves paying for large licensing fees, up front, so that means there was a big investment made already. There are other technical issues around the statistical software, and the infrastructure necessary for it to run, as well as the people with the skills necessary to work with this and maintain it.
What do you with data that you collect?
We look at the data, establish a model, determine patterns in the data, and in the end provide a prognosis for the business customer. This is a long and expensive process that in the end comes up with only one result, after which the consultants disappear again.
Our approach is that we essentially offer all of that as a service, where the companies pay us on a monthly subscription model instead of buying all the software that they can’t really use on their own. They don’t need to buy statistical software or collect data or have statistical proficiency. We provide the data-driven decisions at the date and time that our customers are making their marketing and distribution decisions.
In this day in age there is so much that can be forecast, from the areas of health and finance and politics, where we focus on marketing, distribution, and on customers. There, our main goals is how to keep customers, gain new customers – the retention and return of customers – and trying to minimize the amount of money spent on gaining new customers and the like.
How do you compare yourself to the other companies in this field?
We focus on some very specific fields in the distribution and marketing areas. We want to allow business men and women to make data driven decisions on a daily basis. We are very specific with our mathematical algorithms, but this isn’t what we believe makes our product unique. The main point, for us, is to integrate this into the daily use in businesses. The data will become better and better and should create a definite lift in comparison to the procedures being used currently.
What is your revenue model?
We usually start with one or two test campaigns for our customers. Just to briefly illustrate one to you: for a mailing for a specific product, we pick a certain number of potential clients for a business and they pick the same number of potential clients as well. In the end, what ends up happening is that the potential clients that we chose are four times more likely to make a purchase than the potential clients the businesses themselves chose.
Our conversion rate greatly beats theirs, where 400% more purchases is not a difference that can be ignored. From there on, the business can purchase our services on a monthly basis. From there, we hope to set up automated exchange of data with which we can offer live recommendations for their business.
What are you looking for at the moment: investors, customers, or talent?
All of the above. We are looking for data scientists at the moment. We sell our product as an aide to the decision making process for people, and people, in the end, may have some more information that the machine doesn’t have.
But before we get there, a person needs to gather data, develop the models and more, so thats where the data scientists come in. Talent is what we need most, but we are also looking for investors and customers. We are in contact with some investors who are really supportive and also challenging us to take the project further because they are fascinated with and very hopeful for what we are creating.
Where do you see yourself in one year?
So much can happen in one year! We are currently six full time members working here, in our extended circle we are 15. In one year we would like to really scale our business and product, something that we are constantly working towards already. We are trying to get established in Germany first, but logically we can expand past the border because our product is not language specific.
GPredictive´s mission is to provide customers with solutions that make decisions based upon data as easy as possible. GPredictive´s customers don’t have to worry about raw data and the statistics which leads to good decisions.
