For growing businesses, time to insight is critical for making the decisions that drive strategic growth. See how ChartMogul uses Snowflake to aggregate data, accelerate exports, and provide timely insights—both to its own users and its customers.
Founded in 2014, ChartMogul is a subscription analytics provider that delivers the insights needed to help B2B technology companies—like Hotjar, Pitch, and Teamwork—make better business decisions, drive growth, and fulfill their ambitions. The company is responsible for creating the subscription analytics market, and to this day is the most dominant player in the field.
ChartMogul’s platform connects with billing systems and other APIs, ingesting, normalizing, and aggregating data from a wide range of sources to provide the most actionable and in-depth SaaS metrics possible—including insights into churn rate, lifetime value, average revenue per account, and much more.
Fittingly, the company also relies on a huge amount of data to deliver insights to its internal teams. But for a time, its processes made these insights difficult to come by. Originally, a single analyst would manually oversee all data exports and conduct manual analysis, which meant it sometimes took days for business leaders to gain vital information.
“We wanted a solution that could help us accelerate time to insight and get more from our data more quickly,”said George Petropoulos, Data Engineering Tech Lead at ChartMogul. “That’s why we migrated to Snowflake.”
Low maintenance. Low costs. Infinite scalability.
Through the process of choosing a data warehouse, ChartMogul carried out POCs with various solutions to simulate its final ELT process. Ultimately though, Snowflake offered benefits above and beyond its competitors.
“The ease of maintenance, pay-as-you-go model, multi-cloud support, and great internal adoption were all signs that Snowflake was the solution for us,” said Petropoulos. “When you’re a small team, knowing you don’t have to think about maintaining a system all the time is invaluable. And, as we’re never completely sure of the size of the data we will be working with, the ability to scale seamlessly was a huge benefit.”
In just three months and with just two data engineers, the company migrated its internal analytics processes over to Snowflake. And within a year, the same team delivered a new product feature—Destinations—designed to combine multiple datasets and powered entirely by Snowflake.
Building a better ChartMogul from a single source of truth
Today, ChartMogul uses Snowflake as a single source of truth, integrating data from all its databases and external platforms—like Zendesk, Intercom, and its CRM solutions—into a central location.
It then conducts transformations and aggregations on this data to fuel internal analytics, enabling teams like marketing, sales, and finance to monitor performance, make faster decisions, and act more strategically.
This data is used to track goals, evaluate contributions to growth, see where new business is coming from, monitor churn, and provide endless other insights—all of which contribute to helping ChartMogul decide what to invest and where to drive growth.
Exports executed in seconds to meet customer-facing needs
ChartMogul has also started to use Snowflake to meet its customer facing needs, an area it plans to expand on in the future.
“The speed of development, performance, usability, and decision-making capabilities we’ve experienced have delighted our users, and given us the opportunity to see how we can use this approach in our customer-facing products—including our internal services,” said Petropoulos. “Long term, we now plan to use Snowflake to power many of our customer-facing charts and insights.”
The company has already used Snowflake to accelerate its customer data exports—a process that once took up to several hours but is now executed in a matter of seconds. In a world where speed to insight can make all the difference, this will result in significant benefits.
“People expect data to be at their fingertips, exactly when they need it,” said Petropoulos. “With companies in their growth stages, insights into things like sales, marketing activities, and customer churn are integral to figuring out how they’re going to take on the next phase of their journey. Especially in a market where businesses are increasingly asked to become more adaptable and responsive.”
A helping hand through Snowflake’s Startup Program
Through Snowflake, ChartMogul has access to a wealth of features that can enhance its operations, from end-to-end encryption and Dynamic Data Masking to protect customer data, to those which allow for faster and easier data collaboration.
Many of these features are made available through the Snowflake for Startups program, which allows the company to experiment with both existing and developing tools to optimize its operations.
“Through this program, we’ve been able to share the details of our architecture and plans for the coming months with Snowflake’s experts,” said Petropoulos. “In return, they’ve suggested existing features that can improve the way we work, like the Snowflake’s platform collaboration capabilities. And we’ve been able to access a lot of features in their Beta stage to experiment with new capabilities. This kind of environment makes it much easier for us to attract talented engineers.”
Snowflake for Startups also gives ChartMogul the chance to gain exposure through co-marketing activities, networking, and other events—which are vital for a company with significant growth ambitions.
“We’re a company that has growth in mind,” says Petropoulos. “Vitally, our POCs show that with Snowflake, we will be able to scale our services and work with companies ten times the size of those we work with today.”
Tomorrow’s ChartMogul: supported by Snowflake
Going forward, ChartMogul plans to use Snowflake to power the majority of its customer-facing product, delivering faster time-to-insight for the company’s growing customer base. The company’s goal in the coming months is to go from daily data synchronizations to hourly, and its experience working with Snowflake leaves it in no doubt that it has the right platform to achieve its goals.
“Having used pretty much all the other data tools throughout my career, I think there’s a clear reason why Snowflake is the leader in this area,” says Petropoulos. “Especially if you’re working with smaller teams, as most of us are. Other solutions take much longer to set up, configure, and tune—and in the end Snowflake just gave us more.”
Originally posted on October 27, 2022 @ 7:00 pm
