Scoop Analytics is a company that offers a radical new approach to driving business performance by slashing the barriers analysts face in gathering, manipulating, and analyzing core business data. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Scoop Analytics CEO Brad Peters to learn more about the company.
Brad Peters’ Background
What is Brad Peters’ background? Peters said:
“I was well-known in the data analytics space before becoming the founder of the popular platform Birst, serving as CEO for over 12 years where I grew the business to become a Gartner Magic Quadrant category leader in Analytics and Business Intelligence Platforms before making a successful exit in 2017. I have over two decades of experience launching and scaling technology companies, having previously served as Senior Director of Analytics at Oracle. I’m widely regarded as a product visionary, bringing new concepts to market before they gain broad adoption by customers ranging from startups to the Fortune 100.”
Formation Of Scoop Analytics
How did the idea for Scoop Analytics come together? Peters shared:
“The idea for Scoop came from a longstanding challenge that we faced with both of his prior Business Intelligence roles. Because Business Intelligence products are effectively development tools, they require large amounts of technical skill and effort to initially setup. While many products advertise that they are easy for business users to utilize, that is only true AFTER a data team invests significant development time standing them up. This typically involves purchasing, deploying and integrating a database, some sort of data movement tool to extract data from sources, another tool to manipulate the data into a format that is useful and then finally some sort of BI tool that can be used to explore/visualize the highly curated, custom built data infrastructure. While valuable, this meant that business users could not, on their own, initiate and complete the task of connecting to data sources, massaging that data and then deploying it in a production way. See Scoop demo.”
“Scoop started with the question: what must a product look like that requires only the skills of a single individual, and that individual should only be required to understand how to utilize a spreadsheet? It required something which did not require database skills, setting up of server infrastructure, SQL knowledge or any other IT-related tasks.”
“Working from that premise, Scoop was built to leverage the tools and infrastructure business users already have – business applications and spreadsheets. Scoop developed advanced technology to directly read the reporting layer of any business application, just like a human does, and therefore bypass the entire technical integration challenge. Scoop then intelligently snapshots that data and allows users to use spreadsheets to prepare that data instead of requiring complicated ETL products.”
“These were complex technologies to build, but they allow a single business user/analyst with modest spreadsheet skills to go it alone and do so with unprecedented agility to create powerful, live business analyses and data explorations/stories.”
“These key technical differences unlock an incredible market. Even inside Silicon Valley, most organizations don’t have their own data team. Outside Silicon Valley is an entirely different story – most companies do not have their own data teams. Scoop is simple enough to be used by any business professional – if you can use Excel, you can use Scoop.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Scoop Analytics so far? Peters reflected:
“Recency bias aside, I think it was incredibly satisfying to present to investors about Scoop, and our progress and goals, with data and visualizations and at the end, hit the escape button to show that I had actually been using Scoop to do that and the entire presentation/story was powered by live data.”
Core Products
What are Scoop Analytics’ core products and features? Peters explained:
- Data Ingestion and Visualization:
- Scoop allows users to ingest data from various operational reports, such as Salesforce or JIRA, and visualize it over time to track changes and trends .
- The platform uses time series datasets to create visual representations of processes, such as sales cycles or marketing funnels, enabling users to see the progression and conversion rates at different stages .
- Process Diagrams & Sankey
- Scoop can generate process diagrams that visually depict the stages of a process and the transitions between them. These diagrams show average conversion rates, time taken at each stage, and the number of items (e.g., deals, leads) at each stage .
- This visualization helps identify bottlenecks and inefficiencies in processes, allowing users to make data-driven improvements .
- Sankey charts, for instance, illustrate the flow and conversion of items through various stages, helping to pinpoint areas where improvements are needed .
- Recipes
- Scoop has a number of prepackaged recipes, including MRR waterfall, sales analysis, cohort analysis, which allow users to quickly get started
- Scoop allows for the automation of these reports, reducing the manual effort required to compile and present data .
- Canvas based analysis
- Users can create custom reports and presentations that incorporate live data from their processes. This capability is particularly useful for recurring meetings, such as sales forecasts or board meetings, where up-to-date data and insights are crucial .
- Blending Data:
- Spreadsheet Interface: Once the data is ingested, Scoop presents it in a spreadsheet format, a familiar environment for most business users. This interface allows users to easily manipulate and combine data without needing advanced technical skills.
- Join Operations: Users can perform join operations to blend data from different sources.
- Fuzzy Matching: Scoop supports fuzzy matching to blend data that may not have exact matches.
- Data Augmentation:
- Adding New Columns: Users can add new columns to the blended dataset to calculate new metrics or to format data as needed. This can be done using standard spreadsheet formulas.
- Presentation Canvas/Data Stories
- Scoop can ingest the slide format and template from decks that match the company style; users can then put dynamic charts, graphs, spreadsheets, along with narration, diagrams and more. Users can also present the slides directly out of Scoop, with the ability to filter directly on the slide
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Peters and the team faced in building the company? Peters acknowledged:
“I think the biggest challenge right now is that tech is exceedingly trendy. And right now there is this sense that only AI products (and generative AI in particular) are interesting. At Birst, Brad pioneered automated machine learning for large corporate customers years before AI became trendy. In that experience of applying neural networks, support vector machines and other advanced techniques to business data, he became acutely aware of the capabilities of these methodologies but also their limitations (generally due to data challenges).”
“While Scoop incorporates advanced algorithmics and some machine learning capabilities, it is a more general platform and so the challenge is to help people understand that all business productivity problems had not been solved by 2023, and there was still considerable room to improve the power and capability of the tool sets for business people outside of the world of generative AI.”
Evolution Of Scoop Analytics’ Technology
How has Scoop Analytics’ technology evolved since launching? Peters noted:
“The focus prior to the seed raise was on much of the back end architecture and development – the ability to connect to business applications and prepare data from them. Late last year we undertook a massive engineering effort to revamp the entire front end UI, shifting from static dashboards which are the standard of legacy BI tools, to leverage a completely new, modern UI paradigm for analytics, the canvas in order to facilitate a much richer experience in telling data stories.”
“To that end, the most recent major enhancements has been adding the ability to upload Powerpoint slide decks to Scoop, and build and present visually compelling data stories with the ability to interact with data live. This is something that many of our current customers and prospective customers find deeply compelling – finally, no more needing to include every cut of the data before presenting!”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Scoop Analytics’ most significant milestones? Peters cited:
“While a young company, Scoop has already hit several milestones, both product and GTM focused. Many of them are listed below, and happy to speak more about why each has been so important:
- First time a report from a new data source ingested without any set up, and automatically snapshot that data
- The ability to read financial statements as a data source
- The ability to blend two datasets into a new source using a spreadsheet
- Adding process insights to visualize snapshotted datasets (to visualize changes over time)
- Adding the ability to upload a slide template to the product and present directly out of Scoop
- New website launch May 2024”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Peters about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“One of our first customers used our process insights engine and used it for each member of their sales leadership. With zero implementation work, Scoop was able to do what their data team had tried – and failed – to do for over a year.”
Funding
Upon asking Peters about the company’s funding, he revealed:
“On June 18, 2024, Scoop Analytics announced it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding. Scoop will use the new funds to expand the features of its solution – the first ever to make it easy for anyone with spreadsheet skills to get data from any application, blend data from different sources and tell visually compelling data stories through slide presentations based on live, drillable data to advance their business. The round was led by Ridge Ventures, with participation from returning investors Engineering Capital and Industry Ventures. Ridge Ventures partner Yousuf Khan is joining Scoop’s board. Khan is a former CIO and has been an advisor to early-stage companies such as Material Security, Productiv and Zoom.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is Scoop Analytics pursuing? Peters assessed:
“The business analytics market is estimated at over $50 billion, if you include front-end visualization, data preparation and data infrastructure products. Right now, the market for individual tools to leverage data is around $3 billion. However, each time there was a radical simplification of those tools, the market has broadly doubled so we believe the TAM for Scoop is higher than that.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Scoop Analytics from its competition? Peters affirmed:
“There is no one true competitor to Scoop.”
“At Siebel/Oracle, Birst and all of their competitors, below a certain scale, or beyond a certain agility level, users are simply left to fend for themselves by downloading one-off reports from source applications and using spreadsheets to create point-in-time analysis.”
“Indeed, research analysts have long lamented that the penetration of BI in business has been largely unchanged for the last 20 years despite ever more powerful tools, because the skill sets, investments and timeframes required limited their applicability.”
“Data teams need to combine multiple different types of products manually to engineer a full data lifecycle – from capturing data, to preparing it to presenting it. Typically at least one product from each of the following categories is needed by a data team, and then that team must build technical integrations to bring them together:
- Data access: e.g. FiveTran, AWS Glue
- Data preparation: e.g. DBT, Alteryx, Informatica, Talend, Snaplogic, etc.
- Database: e.g. Snowflake, Redshift, etc.
- Data visualization or presentation software: e.g. Tableau, Microsoft PowerBI, Sigma Computing, Looker, Omni
- There are some vendors that provide allow you to automate bringing data into a spreadsheet, but that’s all: Coefficient, Equals
Given the functional breadth of Scoop, it is an alternative to one-size-fits all pre-packaged applications that require expensive setup and very expensive licenses: e.g. Clari”
Future Company Goals
What are some of Scoop Analytics’ future company goals? Peters concluded:
“To continue to enhance Scoop and grow both our customer base and the diversity of use cases that Scoop serves.”
