Friday, September 28, 2018
Interview with Amit Jain, Bridg
If you're a bricks-and-mortar retailer, looking for information on your customers, it's often very tough to figure out who's coming in the door. Those retailers look over at the online world, and wish they had the same kinds of tools that e-commerce retailers had to help them improve their business. How do they solve that problem? Los Angeles-based Bridg (www.bridg.com), led by CEO and founder Amit Jain, has created a solution which it's been offering to those offline retailers for several years now. The startup is backed by Morpheus Ventures, NextEquity Partners, Visa, and March Capital. We caught up with Amit to hear how things are going.
For a reminder to our readers who haven't been following Bridg, explain again what you do?
Amit Jain: Bridg is a customer data platform and marketing technology for offline retailers. Our mission is to make offline customer data accessible and actionable for offline retailers. If you are in the e-commerce business, you can see people logging into your website, and you can use cookies to track them and know everything about them. You can retarget them, remarket to them, and gain a remarkable amount of intelligence about those customers. However, if you're an offline retailer, say someone like Subway, you have all of these customers walking into your store, and you have no way to really know them, no customer CRM, no way to understand those customers, and no way to retarget them. Brig is a customer data platform for offline retailers. Any offline retailer can sign up for Brig, and they can get a database of everyone who has visited their stores in the last five years or so. We have every single transaction, line-by-line, of customers from their stores. All of those customers in the CRM are retargetable, and measurable. We tie into the point-of-sale systems, so we can track every campaign and purchase, and provide powerful offline data for these brands.
How exactly are you able to collect that data?
Amit Jain: What we do, is we have integrated with all of the major point-of-sale systems that retailers use. Subway is not a customer, but as an example, when you walk into Subway, you pay for a sandwich with your credit card, which you swipe on their machine and then go away. What happens in that point-of-sale equipment, is it's recording what you bought, when you bought it, who the cashier was, and what was the payment method, whether that is a credit card, debit card, or mobile pay. What we do, is we sit on that point-of-sale machine, and grab information on those transactions. We store that in our cloud an dour servers immediately, and run it through a very sophisticated, probabilistic matching algorithm to identify the person who made that transaction. The data on the POS machine doesn't know who you are, so we use our algorithm to really figure out who that is, and connect the transaction to a real person's identity, anonymously. That real person's identity lives in a database that we've built over the last six years. We now have information on 200 million U.S. consumers, who have been visiting retailers and making offline purchases. We take those transactions, and try to find you, and connect that data, and store the matches and identity anonymously.
Who are the main customers adopting your software?
Amit Jain: It's almost anybody with a dominant, offline footprint. Think of Macy's, think of restaurants, think of quick serve restaurants. All of them find this amazing. Our value proposition is very simple. Would you like to know every customer who has visited your customer in the last year? They ask us, where can we sign up? If they go into the product, and they want it tell them who has been visiting five times a month, they can literally click on a button and we show everyone who has been coming into their business. They can send them an offer, or send them a thank you. We can take a group of customers and figure out who has been to the store in the last six months, and set up a promotion to offer them 20 percent off, and reach those customers through digital media, emails, and other channels, allowing businesses to really re-engage their guests. We've become the master system-of-record for customer databases for offline retailers. We can also merge that with their own, online data.
How are things going now with the company?
Amit Jain:We have had a really good last couple of years as a company. We've more than doubled our revenue growth, and we now have close to 50 employees here in Los Angeles, and in San Francisco. We now have over 10,000 locations that we serve through our platform, and many, many iconic retail chains that we work with. I think we've already said that we work with Chipotle, and we also with locations of many other chains. We do not work with SMBs, we only work with corporates with more than 25 stores. Where we are now, is we are making the product more and more self-serve, and are hoping to have a pure self-serve solution for everyone. For now, we're all corporate chains, where we're centrally installable and where they do not need to go store-to-store to install. It actually takes less than a day to get up and running, and less than 48 hours for them to start getting data on their customers.
What's the biggest lesson you've learned so far in getting Bridg to where it is now?
Amit Jain: There's a lot of them, and I could take you out to dinner and talk about it for five hours about all of those lessons. But, let me give you one of the biggest. I think, as I reflect upon it, and what I learned after I left Google, is that you can have a great technical idea, but you have to create value for your customer, and in a form and shape that they see. It's not just the best technology—that doesn't matter, really. What matters, is creating value for your customers. That's when they start to pay you. We had to do some pivots to do that. We had an offline identity tool for a long time, but our customer's didn't care until we showed them what you could do with it, marketing end-to-end, allowing them to see their customer, to provide that master customer database. That's something they weren't even able to do with customer loyalty programs. When people were able to see that we could match their customer database to salesforce and their CRM toos, and they started to see what they could do with that, to engage with customers, to run media through it, and to build applications around it, they started to see their revenues and customer base go up too. When I first started, it was more about building cool technology. Turning that cool technology into an end application was a very interesting journey and learning experience. Now, we look at everything with the lens of what this does for our customers. If it doesn't do much, then it doesn't matter how cool the technology is.
You have some big corporate customers, who aren't known for their adoption of new solutions from startups. What did you do to enable you to sign up those customers at first?
Amit Jain: Interestingly enough, the one thing that was going for us was we were the only people with offline identities. We still are. If you are Subway, there is no one else out there telling you that I can introduce you to all of their customers. They have no idea now, unless those customers are signed up for their loyalty programs, and that's usually only three to four percent of their customers. Once we got into a technology build and were able to show them their customers, and that we could help get those customers to come back and engage with them, to send them offers, and connect that end-to-end loop, the technology became a lever that executives can pull to move their business forward. They can learn more about their customers, and really understand what triggered them to buy. We knew that while analytics would sell, very quickly, only three or four months down the road, we knw that analytics would not be core to day-to-day life. But once, when they can take action, and it starts to help skyrocket their business, and it's core to their strategy, you start to own 30, 40, or 50 percent of mindshare of their activity, that's when you start to see real growth.
So what's the next step now?
Amit Jain: The big investment we've been making this year, is making the entire platform as self service as possible. We're integrating into the partner ecosystem, with point of sale equipment, with advertising partners, with marketing cloud partners, and making the investment to make the product more self-serve. That will allow us to bring it to a much broader array of marketers. In the next 45 days or so, we'll be going out to market with that, probably in November. That should set us up for even more fire, and revenues, and letting us do bigger things to scale the company. After that, we want to make it possible for third parties to access our data through an SDK. We want to build an active ecosystem of companies to build value around retailers, so they can use that data to help make decisions on where to buy real estate, who should they hire, and help them forecast from the data. It will be very interesting to see how our data can be leveraged.
Thanks!