A Q&A with Indicative co-founder and CEO Jeremy Levy. The New York City-based startup, which offers a cloud-based web and mobile analytics platform designed for technical and non-technical users alike, announced its launch out of stealth mode late last month. It was founded in 2013 by Levy and Andrew Weinreich. The team is currently raising a Seed funding round.
SUB: Please describe Indicative and your primary innovation.
Levy: Indicative is the intelligent analytics platform for web and mobile. Our platform is unique in that it has zero learning curve for users without sacrificing any of the power needed to ask and answer the essential questions about your business. We’ve simplified the interface you use to get answers from your data, made everything drag-and-drop in the browser, and packed a huge amount under the hood.
This enables both technical and non-technical users to perform sophisticated analysis—such as segmentations, funnel analysis, and cohort analysis—with a few clicks, and get intelligence faster and in a much more intuitive way.
SUB: Who are your target markets and users?
Levy: All growth-oriented businesses that use data to inform business decisions. Our tools enable decision makers across all departments, from marketing, product, to operations to find the insights that improve their customer acquisition, conversion, and retention.
SUB: Who do you consider to be your competition, and what differentiates Indicative from the competition?
Levy: There are a lot of players in the analytics space; major players include companies like Adobe Omniture, Tableau, and Mixpanel. Indicative differs from everyone else in two key ways: 1.) It’s incredibly easy to use for non-technical users, while still powerful enough for the most technical data scientists; and 2.) our pricing model is unique. Many analytics companies charge per ‘event,’ which often tricks businesses into paying significantly more for a tool without a commensurate increase in the growth of their business. Our pricing instead scales based on how many users businesses have on their app or website. This allows customers to add unlimited events for their users and track everything needed to optimize their business without having to worry about their costs increasing drastically.
SUB: You just launched out of stealth mode. Why was now the right time to launch?
Levy: After spending the last year building and iterating Indicative with feedback from beta testers, we were sure that Indicative was at a point where other businesses would gain value from using it. As a result, since launch we have nearly doubled our number of customers and are growing at a rapid pace.
SUB: Have you raised outside funding to this point?
Levy: We are closing our Seed round shortly, and will be sharing more details on this in the near future.
SUB: What was the inspiration behind the idea for Indicative? Was there an ‘aha’ moment, or was the idea more gradual in developing?
Levy: We built Indicative to solve a massive pain point we had at our previous companies, meetMoi and Xtify. As engineers, marketers, product managers, and all around data geeks, we have tried every analytics tool there is. Every time we went looking for an analytics solution we ended up dissatisfied. There was nothing that enabled our entire team to get instant answers from data that didn’t sacrifice analytical power at a price point that didn’t make us fall out of our chairs.
SUB: What were the first steps you took in establishing the company?
Levy: After we sold meetMoi to Match and Xtify to IBM, our team focused our attention on designing and building an analytics solution. We had actually built an early version of Indicative as an internal tool for those companies, so we were able to hit the ground running, and less than a year later we have a product we are very proud of.
SUB: How did you come up with the name? What is the story or meaning behind it?
Levy: We started with a team brainstorm to find a name that would clearly communicate our analytics background in this extremely crowded space. We had hundred of names on our list, but ‘Indicative’ stood out as a clear winner. Data indicates where businesses are excelling and where they need more attention, and we see Indicative as the easiest and most powerful way to make those discoveries.
SUB: What have the most significant challenges been so far to building the company?
Levy: Balancing the development of our product with our desire to be incredibly customer support focused. Despite having a small team, we are always happy to hop on the phone or sit down with a client or potential client to see how we can better address their needs, and this creates a great feedback loop into the development of the product.
SUB: How do you generate revenue or plan to generate revenue?
Levy: We generate revenue through a subscription-based pricing model that scales directly with the number of monthly users our clients have. Our offerings are designed to be affordable and give clients the most value for the price.
SUB: What are your goals for Indicative over the next year or so?
Levy: We plan to aggressively grow Indicative’s client base, while building out our platform to include new tools and features that make incredibly hard analytical problems amazingly easy to solve for both technical and non-technical users.
