Harley Academy

<ul><li>5 data sources connected: Hubspot, Google Analytics, Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Facebook Ads</li><li>3 teams interacting on reports and metrics: Sales, Marketing, E-commerce</li><li>Upper acquisition funnel (Paid Ads, Google Analytics) is reconciled with their Lower funnel (Hubspot, Woocomerce) to get the full visibility of their acquisition spectrum</li></ul>

Highlights

Harley Academy is the UK's leading healthcare service provider. It provides different services through 3 brands: <ol><li>Harley Academy provides aesthetic medicine training for doctors, dentists, nurses and midwives</li><li>The Academy Clinic provides affordable anti wrinkle, dermal fillers and skin treatments where the patients are cosmetic models for training at Harley Academy</li><li>STORY provides accessible anti wrinkle, dermal fillers and skin treatments administered by Harley Academy trained practitioners</li></ol>

Background

Managing different business lines can be challenging. Especially since the Digital Marketing team at Harley Academy is cross entities. Their acquisition channels are spread over multiple tools (Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Multiples websites, Hubspot, Woocommerce) and building metrics such as Marketing ROI and Customer Acquisition Cost was requiring multiple connexions between those data sources. As Harley Academy is built around transparency, they wanted their acquisition metrics to be shared with all their collaborators and manually combining data every week on Excel wasn’t an option. Their existing solution was built around Google Data Studio and Supermetrics and it wasn’t scaling anymore as some metrics couldn’t be defined due to the limitations of those tools. Hence, the real cost of acquisition per channel, customer and campaign was not properly tracked and shared. Finally, Harley was planning to use a healthcare specific CRM that wasn’t supported by their previous reporting stack, so they were looking for a solution that could adapt to their stack changes.

The Challenge

Harley Academy leverages the full scope capabilities of Whaly to cover the whole data spectrum, from the collection, to modeling and reporting. Combining the data from all their acquisition tools to model custom metrics, such as an exhaustive cost of acquisition, is now possible. Whaly also delivered Drill down abilities to understand what campaigns and channels have the most impact on the sales activity. Since Whaly is simple and no-code, the marketing team is also independent here. No need to type SQL queries or ask for help from the tech team. Finally, it was possible to build and share different reports with the 3 business lines while giving the right level of access to everyone.

Solution

In less than a month, Harley Academy was able to migrate all their acquisition reporting dashboards while also building metrics that were impossible to measure previously. Giving tools to the Marketing team to configure in a no-code way complex metrics gave them the ability to scale their reporting and to precisely measure what they needed. Sharing their metrics with their whole company improved their visibility on all of their business lines and made data a company game, not a solo one.

Results

Not So Dark

Not So Dark is a food tech startup that creates virtual food brands built for the online delivery market. 
 From plant-based burgers to mediterranean pitas, they have 9 food brands that rely on their 300+ restaurant / kitchen partners 
 to supply the meals. Their business model works in a scalable way with their lightning speed set-up, ingredient sourcing, 
 and recipes, all built to fit in “quietly” within existing establishments. They promise to be an easy revenue-generating machine for restaurants.
 
 
 
 Not So Dark is a French startup that’s well-poised for success, now present in 60 cities across France, UK, and Belgium. We’re thrilled to be supporting 
 them on their data journey, helping them leverage data for growth.

<ul>
 <li>Whaly replicates data from Not So Dark’s BigQuery data warehouse, using Not So Dark’s own ETL. They are not using Whaly’s connectors, and leverage Whaly primarily for its visualization and BI capabilities.</li>
 <li>Their goal is to drive revenue growth by measuring the performance of their 9 brands.</li>
 </ul>

Not So Dark & Whaly Summary

<h5>Implementing a data set-up and culture for the first time</h5>
 
 
 Not So Dark is a young, fast-growing company that saw an increasing need to be able to track data and learn from it. 
 They knew that becoming data-driven was critical to fueling their growth, however, they simply didn’t have anything 
 in place to support it back in early 2022. Their main challenge was essentially starting from scratch and laying the 
 groundwork for becoming a data-driven company.
 
 
 
 They needed to take steps to implement a data mindset, culture, and tooling for the first time. 
 In February 2022, they began hiring their first data team. Currently, they’ve built out a solid data team of 
 4: 1 Analytics Engineer and 2 Data Analysts, reporting into the Head of Data. 
 
 
 
 With a team in place, step 2 was to select the right flexible, self-service business intelligence 
 solution from which business teams could easily visualize data and make informed decisions. 
 The most immediate need was to monitor and understand performance KPIs of their brands.

In early July 2022, after evaluating various BI solutions on the market like Looker and Tableau, 
 they finally decided on Whaly because it was clear that it was the most user-friendly platform available for 
 non-technical people, while still offering robust capabilities. The self-service aspect of it was particularly compelling, 
 so that Not So Dark’s small data team wouldn’t be a bottleneck for the business users getting their hands on data. 
 
 
 <h5>Which teams use Whaly? </h5>
 
 
 Folly Akakpovi, Analytics Engineer, is the main builder of Not So Dark’s Whaly instance. 
 He is responsible for creating data models in the data warehouse, and all topics related to data 
 collection and cleanliness. Agathe Fagot and her colleague are Data Analysts who bridge the gap with the 
 business teams. They work on data for the different business units, helping them build dashboards and visualize the data. 
 The data team was responsible for setting up Whaly and has ownership over the data, ensuring its accuracy and quality, 
 which is important to Folly. 
 
 
 
 In addition to the data team, there are 3 business teams who work closely together and use Whaly on a regular basis: 
 <ul>
 <li>Brand Managers: responsible for owning one of their 9 total brands (like Como Kitchen, Vegedal, and others); boosting the brand’s revenue on delivery platforms</li>
 <li>Marketing: supporting the brand managers to market the food brand; maximizing awareness, orders, and engagement</li>
 <li>Growth Team: overall Revenue Growth team which includes Key Success Managers who oversee the franchise restaurant partners</li>
 </ul>
 
 
 
 As of September 2022, 2 months after they implemented Whaly, Not So Dark has 37 total users signed up on Whaly, an incredibly fast surge in a short period of time. 
 
 
 <h5>Use Case: Monitoring brand performance</h5>
 
 
 Not So Dark’s main use case for using Whaly is to get ongoing, real-time visibility into operations and performance KPIs 
 around each of their 9 brands, with the purpose of ensuring that their brands are successfully growing and appealing to 
 the market. 
 
 
 
 With Whaly, Not So Dark could be informed on key metrics for each brand, such as: number of orders, order values, 
 overall brand revenue, and brand performance in specific countries/cities. They could easily see which brands were 
 performing better or worse than others, and make improvements accordingly. 1 restaurant partner can operate 2-3 brands, 
 so they could see specific KPIs around which restaurant partners were contributing to the brands.

The Solution

The days of only the data team working with data are over - for the best! With Whaly, Not So 
 Dark has been able to easily boost data adoption across the company, which is the first step to 
 building a data-driven culture where people trust and lean on data to make key decisions. 
 Whaly’s quick implementation, low learning curve, and user-friendly interface removed any friction 
 to getting started, which was key for spreading adoption to non-technical users. 
 In only 2 short months, 37 users at Not So Dark have adopted Whaly. 
 The more business users are “sold” on data and know how to leverage it to their advantage, 
 the higher the chances of becoming a data-driven company.
 
 
 
 With Whaly’s self-service focus, the business users across the Brand Management, Marketing, and Growth teams 
 at Not So Dark have the autonomy of serving themselves the analytics and insights they need around brand performance. 
 They are able to pilot certain brands and make decisions and changes with confidence, since it’s backed by data. 
 
 
 
 This makes for an efficient process - where data gets in the hands of the end users who are responsible for business 
 decisions and growth faster and easier. The data team doesn’t act as a bottleneck, and business users are not reliant 
 on anyone else to get data. 
 
 
 
 From the data teams’ point of view, Whaly has saved them plenty of time. They don’t feel obligated to help the 
 business users with every request. It’s been very “positive in terms of workload, with less friction and frustration,” 
 according to Agathe. All non-technical teams can visualize data in real-time on their own. 
 
 
 
 In summary, while we’re only at the beginning of our journey with Not So Dark, we’re proud to have helped them achieve: 
 
 
 <ul>
 <li>
 Data adoption at Not So Dark from 0 to 37 users in 2 months. That’s roughly 50% of the company! They’re now on 
 their way to quickly becoming a data-driven company. With all the new hires joining and the data
 teams’ limited bandwidth, the business users are even handling the onboarding of Whaly to new users, in some cases. 
 This “snowball” effect is sure to result in adoption and trust in data. 
 </li>
 <li>
 Empowering business teams to be autonomous with data, due to Whaly’s strong self-service capabilities. 
 Training time to get business users up to speed on Whaly is only 1 hour. 
 </li>
 <li>
 Time saver for data teams, so they can focus on fewer menial tasks and avoid fielding business requests all day. Data 
 teams were spending 2 hours/week on Whaly in August 2022, and are now spending under 20 minutes/week in September. 
 </li>
 </ul>
 
 <h5>What Not So Dark loves about Whaly:</h5>
 
 <ul>
 <li>Strong self-service capabilities for business teams; user-friendliness </li>
 <li>Ownership of data by data team, to ensure high governance </li>
 <li>Whaly’s customer support via Slack has been very reliable, collaborative and fast </li>
 </ul>
 
 We look forward to expanding our use cases with Not So Dark, and to watching their success continue to skyrocket!

The Results

Beanstock

Beanstock is an online real-estate marketplace that simplifies how retail investors buy and manage buy-to-let properties. 
 The Beanstock platform equips retail investors with the tools they need to finance, acquire, and manage these properties 
 entirely online, streamlining the end-to-end process and disrupting the traditional real estate market in Europe. They offer 
 research and insights to help evaluate a property’s potential, and help investors every step of the way - making real estate 
 investing incredibly simple. Beanstock is fast-growing Series A startup based in Paris, with ambitious growth goals.

<ul>
 <li>Beanstock is connected to 7 sources via Whaly: Days, Google Ads, Facebook Ads, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, HubSpot, PostgreSQL</li>
 <li>Beanstock mainly leverages Whaly to track team performance and company revenue. This is currently handled by the Business Operations teams, who are setting up a scalable data foundation and efficiently building reporting to C-levels, managers, and individual contributors. </li>
 </ul>

Beanstock & Whaly Summary

<h5>Combining Multiple Data Sources & Lack of Robust Reporting</h5>
 
 
 Beanstock’s main challenge was that their company’s data was fragmented and trapped in 
 their various tools. This meant they were only able to create reporting that reflected data from that single source system. 
 
 
 
 Beanstock uses HubSpot as their CRM for their front-line revenue teams, for example, which means all deal, 
 prospect, and customer information lives within HubSpot. They also have their own back-office data repository 
 called “Soil” in Postgres, with valuable data that needed to be combined and analyzed with HubSpot data. With 
 most dashboard creation happening within HubSpot at the time, it wasn’t possible to include data from Postgres or any 
 other sources. 
 
 
 
 They knew that continuing in this way would not make for a scalable foundation on which they could consistently perform 
 robust reporting. There were three main challenges that they needed to overcome: 
 <ol>
 <li>
 HubSpot’s limited analytical capabilities, since it’s not a data analytics platform and dashboards and visualizations 
 are not their main strength. Without a proper BI platform, they would be a lack of robustness around the dashboard 
 & chart creation capabilities. 
 </li>
 <li>
 The inability to combine data from other sources. They weren’t able to combine HubSpot + Postgres data - there was also 
 no way to combine Marketing information around acquisition (from Google & Facebook Ads), together with Sales, 
 for example. 
 </li>
 <li>
 Limited resources with no “data” team or 
 technical team assigned to analytics 
 </li>
 </ol>
 
 
 
 To resolve this, they needed a robust BI platform that was built for data analytics. They also knew that implementing 
 a BI platform would make them well-positioned to become a data-driven company, which was always the goal, but with smaller 
 organizations, it’s always a balance of cost and priorities. 
 
 
 
 As they were getting to a point where they knew what they wanted and needed from data, with with the work completed in “Soil,” 
 it was time for a BI platform to be prioritized. Last but not least, the platform would need to be intuitive and user-friendly 
 to non-technical users.

Whaly was implemented in July 2022 as the answer to their fragmented data challenges. Not only does Whaly serve as a proper business 
 intelligence platform that allows for combining various data sources, it was the precisely the cost-effective and intuitive tool that 
 they needed. 
 
 
 
 Beanstock has 4 main Builders using Whaly - 3 members of the Business Operations team: namely Romain Valverde and Dylan Besset, and 
 Beanstock’s CFO, Sleiman Sleiman. These roles do not necessarily require technical expertise, so it was important to be able to get 
 up and running without knowing code or SQL. Whaly’s Flow (visual modeling language) and intuitive exploration and visualization layer 
 quickly empowered the Builders to create valuable reporting for the rest of the business.
 
 
 
 Beanstock has connected 7 sources to Whaly, and now have all the tools they need to model the data together in a way that’s 
 useful for monitoring business performance and uncovering insights quickly. 
 
 
 
 Beanstock’s Business Operations team are the main champions, helping these below functions with dashboards for ongoing 
 performance monitoring, critical in steering them in the right direction and informing key business decisions: 
 <ol>
 <li>Marketing - Acquisition data </li>
 <li>Sales - Deal and prospecting data </li>
 <li>Supply - Partnerships data around properties and real estate agents</li>
 <li>Operations - Customer, legal data for client projects</li>
 </ol>
 
 
 
 In addition to dashboards for the ongoing monitoring of business pulse and performance, they also use Whaly to help them 
 with forecasting, leveraging forecasts to create KPIs and objectives, and also answering Ad Hoc questions. They also rely 
 on Whaly to help them answer questions like “when someone makes an offer on a property, how long does it take for the offer 
 to get signed?” 
 
 
 
 While all business users can view reporting within Whaly, for now, the Builders push dashboards and reports to display 
 environments for consumption by the rest of the business. This is how they ensure that business users can get access 
 to their relevant dashboards. 
 
 
 
 However, in the coming months, once there’s total confidence that data is properly structured within Whaly and everything 
 is clean, they plan to boost adoption of Whaly across the entire business, and empower more business users to use Whaly 
 for its self-service capabilities. They plan to take take advantage of the free Viewer licenses, by encouraging everyone 
 to have their own logins for Whaly, to access and fetch their own analytics when they need it.

Within only 4 months of using Whaly, Beanstock is now able to conveniently share analytical information to anyone 
 within the organization much more easily. All internal stakeholders are now much more aligned and up-to-date on 
 the performance and results of various teams. This helps people do their jobs better and track goals across three layers: 
 
 
 <ul>
 <li>
 Individual contributors at the team level (CSM, Sales reps) - reps and contributors are able to visualize 
 their work and outcomes on an ongoing basis 
 </li>
 <li>
 Manager level view - managers are able to understand how their whole team is performing, and try to troubleshoot 
 any issues with specific team members or opportunities 
 </li>
 <li>
 C-level view - Beanstock’s leadership team can now get an ongoing pulse into how the company is performing and show 
 compelling visualizations that tell an accurate story in board meetings
 </li>
 </ul>
 
 With Whaly, Beanstock is also able to efficiently organize their company’s data so that it’s always easy to find in the 
 future. They leverage the Folders within Whaly to ensure that users can always find what they need. 
 
 
 
 The Whaly dashboards are even broadcasted on TV screens around the office so that everyone’s aware of goals and progress. 
 With this level of transparency and alignment around data, they are surely set to become a truly data-driven organization! 
 We’re confident that soon enough, they will achieve their adoption goals of Whaly and foster trust in data at a company 
 level. 
 
 
 
 Once adoption grows among business users, the Business Operations team will also save time by reducing the energy and 
 work they currently put into creating dashboards and reports. 
 
 
 <h5>What Beanstock loves about Whaly:</h5>
 
 <ul>
 <li>Quick implementation </li>
 <li>Interface - intuitive, drag & drop features make it really easy to figure out </li>
 <li>Attractive price and value for money </li>
 <li>
 A tailored experience and trusting two-way partnership in which Whaly’s product team has swiftly 
 implemented new features based on customer needs. They didn’t want to go with a rigid “one size fits all” 
 legacy platform that wouldn’t have taken their needs into account 
 </li>
 <li>
 Product flexibility and customization 
 </li>
 </ul>
 
 We look forward to helping Beanstock grow through ongoing data visibility!

Zefir

Zefir is an all-in-one real estate platform that allows users to buy and sell homes in one simple and secure transaction. 
 It empowers anyone to move houses in the best way possible, on their own terms, so they can easily and freely embark on new 
 adventures.
 
 
 
 Tackling a major pain point of many European homeowners, they’re growing at a fast pace, now at 70 employees in just 2 years. 
 They operate in France currently, but have ambitious plans to expand across Europe. We’re delighted to help them leverage 
 data to continue their rapid growth trajectory!

<ul>
 <li>Zefir is connected to 10 sources via Whaly: Aircall, Days, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, HubSpot, Jaffle Shop, Pennylane, PostgreSQL</li>
 <li>Zefir leverages Whaly for analytics reporting for: Operations, Finance, and Pricing Analyst Team Performance </li>
 </ul>

Zefir & Whaly Summary

Zefir has a small data team of 5 people, all data engineers and data scientists. With highly technical backgrounds, 
 none of their roles are specifically dedicated to Analytics. However, the rest of the business relied on them for data 
 related to performance and operations, to ensure that their business was moving in the right direction.
 
 
 
 Back in 2021, before Zefir started using Whaly, business teams were not able to consume or learn from data. Since 
 uncovering this data required technical expertise, data was essentially “trapped” in this small team that already 
 had a lot on their plate. Without this team putting time and resources into extracting the data for analytics, 
 nobody else in the business would be able to access or work with data, which was problematic for business growth 
 and implementing a data-driven culture. 
 
 
 
 They knew they needed a tool to help streamline this process. Not just any tool, something that gave them an easy 
 way to gather data from various sources, visualize the data in dashboards and reports, and share with business teams 
 who needed it.
 
 
 
 The challenge was getting data out to rest of the business quickly, particularly with the limited bandwidth of this 
 team. Whaly made it possible for them to get set up on the platform in lightning speed, and present the data in a clear, 
 simple way that would provide ongoing visibility to the business teams. With Whaly, for the first time, Zefir was able 
 to answer analytical questions and understand key data around operations and performance, to meet their KPIs. They 
 plan to hire a Data Analyst at some point, but Whaly really helped them fill this void with its simplicity of use 
 for both data teams and business teams.

Whaly was implemented in January 2022. Thiago Sabetta, Engineering Manager who oversees a team of data engineers and data 
 scientists, is the main builder. He decided on Whaly because he was convinced by its ease of use and implementation speed. 
 In addition, for a startup like Zefir, it was clear that Whaly was the most flexible option, offering a solution that is 
 tailored to them, with a highly collaborative product team that worked in partnership with Thiago. 
 They weren’t in the position to go for a bulky BI tool with a long learning curve and heavy implementation requirements. 
 For them, Whaly was the best choice for getting up and running quickly, and to start adding value right away. 
 
 
 
 The use cases for Whaly are: 
 <ul>
 <li>Team performance of pricing analysts: The Pricing Analyst team is responsible for 
 figuring out the correct price for a home/apartment based on market conditions, and prepare 
 offers accordingly. They have daily targets of how many offers to prepare, and have a dashboard 
 set up in Whaly to track this. The Pricing Analyst Team Lead refers to this dashboard on a regular 
 basis and relies on it for his regular team meetings. Based on this reporting, the Team Lead can 
 quickly understand team performance (how many offers each team member is producing), and see how 
 many offers met the criteria vs. not fit to be put forth. 
 </li>
 <li>Global company dashboard with company KPIs</li>
 <li>Operations: by aggregating data from different sources on Whaly, Zefir can show an overview all houses 
 that are in the portfolio and evaluate performance: how long have they been on sale? Are they selling quickly enough? 
 They can also manage the logistics and visits of the houses. Operations is one of the main use cases, and is 
 used to drive efficiencies, optimize, set processes, and troubleshoot any issues.
 </li>
 <li>Finance reporting that looks at the operations from a finance point of view. Maintenance cost vs. profit.</li>
 </ul>
 
 
 
 Zefir has 4 users signed up to the Whaly platform itself, but they have more data consumers who are viewing the data that’s 
 been pushed out to Google Sheets. Whaly’s Push feature allows for data from Whaly’s dashboards to be sent to the 
 existing channels and systems that the business users are accustomed to working in. This is step one to data adoption. 
 Once business users trust in data and become more familiar with it, we’re hoping more of them will understand how to 
 self-serve the analytics they need within the Whaly platform.

For the first time, Zefir’s business users have access to analytics that will inform key business decisions 
 and enable them to track KPIs. That’s a big win! This ensures that their business growth is on the right track, 
 and allows them to optimize or troubleshoot areas that could be improved. 
 
 
 
 With Whaly, this visibility into analytical data was provided to business users in record time, with impressively low effort. 
 The data team was pleasantly surprised by how simple it was to connect to sources and get going. Whaly empowered 
 them to efficiently gather data and make it useful almost immediately. As a result, this team of data engineers 
 and scientists would no longer be a bottleneck to accessing data, and has offloaded a lot of work and pressure 
 from their team.
 
 
 
 With Whaly’s user-friendly self-service capabilities, Zefir is assured that once adoption improves, business users 
 will be able to work efficiently within Whaly to get what they need, when they need it - preventing chart requests 
 from piling up, and reducing dependency on the data team. 
 
 
 Whaly is adding a lot of value already, but they’re looking forward to Whaly being more integrated across the company 
 and boosting widespread data adoption, which is sure to happen over time. Currently, business users have their 
 dashboards and ongoing visibility into data for the first time, which is a great first step. However, 
 it’s easy at this stage for people to take this data access for granted. 
 If Whaly were to be turned off tomorrow, a lot of people would notice and request help! Once familiarity with 
 Whaly and data is achieved, things can only go up from here. According to Thiago, once they hire a Data Analyst 
 and invest a few more resources into Whaly, it will add even more value. 
 
 
 
 Plus, Whaly is much cheaper than established solutions, like Looker, for example. Looker’s cost and learning curve 
 was off-putting, and they quickly realized that Whaly has all the benefits that you’d get from Looker, 
 but at a fraction of the cost, time, and headache. 
 
 
 <h5>What Zefir loves about Whaly:</h5>
 
 <ul>
 <li>Time to value. Fast implementation; easy to connect to sources and set up </li>
 <li>Highly reactive and collaborative support team. From day 1, it has felt like a true partnership with Whaly’s 
 product team </li>
 <li>Interface and features have evolved in a great way over the 10 months of using Whaly </li>
 <li>
 Whaly has all the benefits and features that you would get with Looker, but at the fraction of the cost and set-up time 
 </li>
 </ul>

Lokki

Lokki is a software solution that helps equipment rental companies streamline their equipment rental businesses and grow their revenue. Lokki’s all-in-one tool helps companies like Decathlon, Homie Boards & Suits, and Boulanger simplify their daily rental management, provide a new customer experience, and even handle administrative tasks. Growing quickly across France, we’re excited to help them scale and deliver on their KPIs through real-time data visibility!

<ul>
 <li>Lokki is connected to 10 sources via Whaly: Aircall, Days, Facebook Ads, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Sheets, Lemlist, Pipedrive, Slack, Stripe</li>
 <li>Lokki leverages Whaly for analytics reporting for: Marketing, Finance, and Product use cases</li>
 </ul>

Lokki & Whaly Summary

<h4>Inability to combine marketing & sales data</h4>
 When Guillaume Landegren, Growth Lead, joined Lokki in 2021, he noticed that there was no data foundation or platform through which he could track and measure marketing-related metrics. There was no BI tool that could reconcile data from both marketing and sales tools, which means he lacked a clear understanding of the return on investment on ad spend. It was tricky to spend money on Facebook or Google ads, and not know whether the investment was worthwhile. As 75% of Lokki’s customers come from inbound, their marketing spend across various activities and channels, along with their respective ROI, were vital to track and understand. 
 
 At his previous company, data was crucial to his role and he was always leveraging dashboards to learn how his marketing campaigns were working across different channels, and how they tied to closed revenue. For his Growth marketing role at Lokki, he knew that a data analytics platform was something that would be needed right away. 
 
 <h4>Manual calculations of SaaS finance metrics</h4>
 In addition, Lokki’s SaaS finance metrics like CAC, LTV, MRR, and more, were calculated manually in spreadsheets at the time. Back then, they would have to download the data and make calculations on spreadsheets manually, whenever they needed to report these numbers. They weren’t able to keep a pulse on these metrics on a regular, routine basis, which was key to understanding company health and trajectory. 
 
 For both marketing and finance use cases, it became clear that they needed a BI platform that could combine various data sources, and display these metrics in real-time. This would save time and help Lokki make better decisions around their company finances and marketing efforts. 
 
 Once they recognized this need and demand, the main question was how to get this up and running as quickly as possible, without spending too much time or money. Hiring a technical data team would be a big cost, and it was difficult to justify as a young SaaS startup.

Whaly was implemented in 2021, with Guillaume and Benoit Prigent (Co-Founder at Lokki) leading the charge as the main builders. Neither have a data engineering background, but this was no problem. The Whaly team helped them with the implementation process, from start to finish. They helped them set up their Google BigQuery data warehouse, replicate their data into Whaly, and create the initial dashboards. The onboarding process was smooth and completed in a way that empowered anyone to be a data analyst — even without the expertise or skillset. 
 
 Within 1 month, Lokki had their first dashboards and reports built within Whaly, and a solid understanding of how they could leverage the platform in their everyday roles. 
 
 The use cases for Whaly are:
 <ul>
 <li>Marketing dashboards: Using Whaly to combine various marketing sources with Pipedrive (Sales CRM). This allows them to track marketing performance and spend across channels, to better understand ROI. By tying marketing efforts to closed revenue, they could make better decisions. For Lokki, marketing doesn’t stop at acquiring leads — it’s important for the marketing team to understand how many opportunities and deals are created from the leads.</li>
 <li>Finance dashboards: Dashboards that display the key SaaS metrics: CAC, LTV, and MRR. These are vital for board meetings, and help convey overall company health.</li>
 <li>Product dashboards: Dashboards that show product usage — # of clients, which features are being used, which aren’t, and number of bookings on the bikes or other equipment for each client.</li>
 </ul>
 
 For Guillaume’s Growth role, he leverages the Marketing dashboard the most, which contains spend and performance information for Facebook Ads and Google Ads. He enjoys using Whaly’s Google Chrome extension on a daily basis, which provides him with a snapshot of the marketing results and performance of the week or month. If he has a particular question about the data in the dashboard, he enjoys using the Exploration function to dive in and run queries that will give him deeper insights.
 
 Lokki now has roughly 6 users using the platform - almost 20% of the entire company - with more to come. They expanded from marketing and finance use cases to the product use case in early 2023, and many of the product team have adopted Whaly to understand how users interact with their platform, and their satisfaction levels. The sales team leverages Whaly mainly as viewers / consumers, and the next step will be to get them to leverage Whaly more to track certain performance metrics that Pipedrive analytics doesn’t offer. While Pipedrive makes it easy enough to visualize sales performance by rep, Whaly’s benefit lies in the ability to combine different sources and visualize the “big picture” revenue metrics.

<h4>Finally a way to monitor performance and spend </h4>
 For the first time, Lokki was able to get real-time access to analytics that inform key marketing and finance decisions. The main benefit is that the founders and marketing team are able to take a quick look at the overall performance, and understand whether they missed something, or whether something needs to be improved. From the marketing dashboard, for example, Guillaume has easy visibility into all the expenses for each marketing channel per campaign. The results of the campaign are at his fingertips, and he can leverage this data to understand what worked, what didn’t, and what to do next. 
 
 <h4>Boosting adoption across new teams </h4>
 After 2 years of using Whaly, they are doing a great job spreading adoption and expanding use cases to better serve the entire business with data that will help them in their daily tasks and decisions. They recently hired new product leads, who immediately jumped into Whaly and have created new product dashboards. They’ve generated plenty of new insights that will help inform the product development going forward. Lokki has been effective in sharing and educating the Product team on the benefits and how to use Whaly.
 
 So far, everyone is very happy with Whaly, and they see it as a crucial platform that helps them make better, faster decisions that are always backed by live data.
 
 What Lokki loves about Whaly:
 <ul>
 <li>Fast implementation and time to value </li>
 <li>Great onboarding support and visual flow modeling capabilities, which enabled them to build dashboards without knowing SQL. No need to hire a data team. </li>
 <li>Whaly’s Google Chrome extension that shows a snapshot of the main dashboard without signing in or spending time finding the dashboard. This enables users to get into the habit of always relying on data for decision-making.</li>
 </ul>

Ignition Program

Ignition Program is the leading recruitment agency for technology startups and enterprises in France. With their proven HR expertise and innovative tools and programs, their mission is to strengthen the alignment between individuals and organizations. They’ve helped 3,500+ companies like Mano Mano and Doctolib find the right talent. We’re excited to be helping them unlock further success through data visibility and data-driven insights!

<ul>
 <li>Ignition Program has connected 5 sources within Whaly: Airtable, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Pennylane, PostgreSQL </li>
 <li>Ignition Program leverages Whaly for analytics reporting for: Recruitment, Key Account Management (Sales), Marketing, Product, and Finance use cases</li>
 </ul>

Ignition Program & Whaly Summary

<h4>No internal data reporting set-up = blind business decisions </h4>
 Before Ignition Program started using Whaly, there was no data stack or platform in place for internal reporting, which meant a lack of understanding around team performance, what was working, and what wasn’t. Business decisions were made mainly based on gut feeling, business experiences, and intuition, rather than facts and figures. In fact, due to this lack of visibility, some performance figures were even going down. At the time, it was difficult to troubleshoot why this was the case, and how to turn things back around.
 
 <h4>Inability to combine different data sources </h4>
 Ignition Program uses HubSpot as their CRM, which offers some built-in basic analysis of the data that lives within the CRM. They were using Pennylane as their accounting tool, in which they could extract some numbers and perform light analysis. Lastly, they had their own internal tool that matched job opportunities with candidates. From this tool, they had no choice but to perform manual, time-consuming calculations. 
 
 While they had data collected within these three separate tools, the issue was that there was no way to efficiently combine the data sources together to perform more complex analyses. They were not able to link finance and accounting data with CRM data, for example, which meant there were limitations to their ability to derive valuable insights. 
 
 In early 2023, data became an urgent topic for them. They knew they needed to put something in place to help guide decision-making, and to better monitor performance and metrics around their business and revenue — and to ensure that the figures were going up, not down!

Ignition Program knew that they had to implement a data strategy at their organization, and put a data stack in place. They appointed Aude de Fornel, now Data Analyst at Ignition Program, to lead this important initiative. She had started out at the company 5 years prior in sales, moved into operations, and with the help of a data analysis boot camp, was eventually put in charge of all things data and change management at Ignition Program. 
 
 Upon completion of her boot camp, she enlisted the help of freelance data consultants to help scope out what their data stack should look like. They put their Google BigQuery data warehouse in place, and then did a lot of research around business intelligence tools, benchmarking them against each other. That’s when they begin their Proof of Concept (POC) with Whaly. 
 
 They started implementing basic internal dashboards that monitored sales performance and recruitment processes. Despite the team not having a deep data background, the dashboards were easy to set up, and quick to provide value. Plus, they realized that leveraging Whaly’s ETL connectors meant that they could save lots of money and headache on bespoke ETL solutions, like Fivetran. The Whaly team also closely assisted Ignition Program during the POC, which really solidified the partnership and showed the value of the solution. 
 
 Now, Ignition Program uses Whaly for the following use cases:
 <ul>
 <li>Recruitment: Helps the recruitment team monitor their process and performance around finding candidates. They can better understand candidate admission and conversion rates across stages. They also set up individual performance tracking for each recruiter, which helps each rep improve.</li>
 <li>Key Account Management (Sales): Helps sales teams grow revenue and boost efficiencies by monitoring the process of finding clients with job opportunities that need to be filled by candidates. Through Whaly dashboards, they can see a “snapshot” of the volume of opportunities across each step of the journey, conversion rates, and how long each opportunity has remained in each stage.</li>
 <li>Product: Dashboards have been created from product data that’s pulled from Ignition Program’s internal tool (from Postgres).</li>
 <li>Overall Finance & Revenue: Dashboards that are helpful for the board, showing a high-level snapshot of company health and performance </li>
 </ul>
 
 Since data was never properly set up at Ignition Program before Whaly, they also had to overcome the challenge of re-building trust and confidence around data. By evangelizing the importance of data and spreading the use of data and Whaly across to 5 different teams, Ignition Program is surely becoming a more data-driven company. Now, 70% of their company is an active user of Whaly, while overall adoption has hit 90%.

Ignition Program continues to get a lot of value out of every dashboard that has been created. When they went through a re-org during the summer of 2023, however, they needed to adapt their existing dashboards to match the new team structure and strategy. Whaly was able to flex to their new needs and demands, without wasting any time. 
 
 <h4>“Staffing dashboard” that adapted to their new re-org, better matching candidates with opportunities </h4>
 When the re-org happened and sales became a separate function from the recruitment function, they needed a way to better “match” the client job opportunities with the recruitment search for candidates. With Whaly, they were able to quickly implement a “Staffing dashboard” right away, which displayed the types of roles (Product vs. Sales or Marketing) that were open and in demand (by volume and percentage open), helping to inform the Recruitment team what types of roles they should search for. This way, if the Product roles were mostly fully staffed already, the recruiters wouldn’t spend time focusing on these profiles. 
 
 <h4>Boosting adoption across new teams </h4>
 After a little over a year using Whaly, Ignition Program has been doing a fantastic job spreading adoption and expanding to new use cases with Whaly - 70% of Ignition Program is considered an active user, and 90% of the company has logged into Whaly. That’s impressive! This is critical because it empowers various teams to complete their daily tasks and make key decisions based around factual numbers, trends, and insights derived from data. No more intuition-based decisions, it’s now all about data! They have also successfully reversed the initial feeling of lack of trust and confidence around data. It’s incredibly impressive what Aude, as the solo Data Analyst at Ignition Program, has been able to achieve in a short time! 
 
 <h4>Data Champions Program</h4>
 Whaly’s intuitive and easy-to-use platform enabled the birth of the “Data Champions Program” at Ignition Program, spearheaded by Aude. She identified 5 people across different business teams, who are naturally inclined and interested in data. With training sessions, regular check-ins and roadmap meetings with these champions and key stakeholders, Aude has been able to effectively transfer her knowledge and help spread the data culture across the organization. Whaly’s self-service capabilities make it possible for business users to feel empowered and autonomous in their data access and analysis. 
 
 <h4>Next step: External data experiences for their clients </h4>
 What’s next? Their upcoming data goal is to provide relevant recruitment data to specific clients, most likely embedded into the client’s existing tooling. Whaly offers this as part of their capabilities, alongside a Partner Portals functionality, that allows for customized, packaged data experiences for each client in a standalone portal. 
 
 What Ignition Program loves about Whaly:
 <ul>
 <li>Whaly’s responsive and hands-on customer support makes it feel like a trusting partnership. Whaly is very open to feedback and have developed new features to enhance the platform according to our needs.</li>
 <li>This level of support was particularly helpful during the Proof of Concept (POC) period, making implementation and onboarding very smooth and less daunting. Whaly came out as the clear winner on top of other platforms we tried, such as Metabase and Looker Studio. </li>
 <li>Ignition Program’s business users are saying that Whaly is saving them in their jobs! </li>
 </ul>

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