Deepnote case study

We are in high-performance mode at Deepnote and at the beginning of last year we were looking for deeper answers and more end-to-end ownership basically proper evaluation of our marketing initiatives.

And Since Tomas came in, we were able to grow more than 2× while at the same time decreasing our customer acquisition cost by over 70%.

So yeah, now we feel pretty happy but more importantly we feel confident that whenever we touch something in LinkedIn Ads Manager or Google Search campaigns, or we decide to increase our spend on any campaign that we are running, we actually know how much it impacts our revenue, how much is it actually bringing value to the company in scalable way versus just, just throwing money out.

So yeah we are confident and happy and it's actually much safer space to do anything in marketing than before.

Deepnote is a series A startup, deep-tech , We were very hyped earlier during the machine learning phase and raised over $20 million.

We started scaling, we had a lot of students using our product, and we have struggled with revenue.

So at one point we started we started focusing on CAC customer acquisition costs and spending marketing money where it actually matters.

As we scaled the team we first hired marketing and sales team in San Francisco and worked with great people like Kevin White and few others.

They pushed our marketing game from the baby steps to you know to, to a big, to a big format.

We have started spending a lot on Google search ads, LinkedIn Ads and few other channels.

few other channels.

But for for almost one year we hadn't found a way to actually reason about our marketing spent well even though we had a data team at the time.

And basically we were able to attribute a lot of our marketing spend, a lot of our campaigns but we had not really gone through the proper return on investment there.

We have been spending a lot of money on marketing and we had been able to see what rougly worked but we never asked the right questions, and we never really evaluated our overall marketing strategy or marketing initiatives.

So that's where Tomas came in.

He first started asking us important questions that we hadn't really asked ourselves before.

So we calculated expected lifetime value for our ideal customers or average customers.

We looked deeper into what types of ads work, how they resonate with our ICP and not just ICP in the common sense, but also what do these people actually do inside the product?

So we connected all of our product analytics to most ad platforms.

At the same time we were being pushed by investors to keep growing.

At the beginning we had a lot of users but not all of them were paying.

But as time went by we had more and more and larger and larger customers use our product.

we have also grew our revenue by well quite a lot more than, more than we, more than we expected.

yeah, like over 150% of revenue growth year over year .

We wanted to decrease our customer acquisition cost or basically shorten the payback period of the money that we spent on marketing.

And by the end of the year we were able to decrease our customer acquisition cost by like five times so by 72% while growing more than double over the last year.

So I really recommend working with Tomas.

And right now we have all the tooling and all the dashboards we need to calculate return on investment in any kind of marketing or performance marketing campaign.

Tomas is very strong technically to pinpoint the problems in our technical analytics tooling set up so that we can answer the questions that we want.

Marketing technology or marketing tech is not really standardized yet, and a lot of people use different types of tools and it's not easy to not get lost in all of these tools.

So this is one of the strong traits of Tomas that he's also technical but even more importantly asking the business questions properly where we actually want to gain some not direct revenue but basically gain some return on the investment in marketing.

So he was actually the first marketing consultant that asked us the questions that we didn't really want to see the answers to at the beginning .

He was really pushing us for doing the types of advertisements that we can calculate that are doing something for us.

Basically revenue- or goal-driven , value driven way of extracting revenue from our product through marketing spend.

So now we are actually pretty stable in looking at our marketing metrics and we feel pretty safe that any kind of change in LinkedIn or Google search ads will not cause unreasonable spend without the answers that we need.

I really recommend Tomas for his ability to also go deep and fix technical problems but at the same time stepping back and look at the business objectives, ask the business related questions about revenue and about profitability.

So, so that even if you are hyped and if you have investment as a startup, sooner or later you will need to be pushed for this type of behavior.

So, this is really good that Tomas is with us and helping us, push properly.

Yeah, recommend.