Business Intelligence Platform for Marketing

A SaaS MVP based on web scraping, data analytics and data visualization. Used to provide insights about competitors and market, provide pricing recommendations.

Challenge

When one of our partners that we worked with on one mobile app has been told that our specialization is Business Intelligence, he always immediately came up with a request for a service that he was thinking about to implement over the last several months.

He was going to design and build a web-based SaaS software that should track marketing data of user’s competitors’ websites, provide analytics, recommendations and automate some other marketing processes. That obviously looked like a massive and complex project. On the other hand, there were time and budget limitations for an MVP stage.

Solution

We’re always excited to work in the Business Intelligence area, and this project was a great opportunity to work on BI in the field of marketing at scale.

The features for an MVP stage were discussed and selected together with the client on the presale stage. We were aiming for an early launch in 3 months. It had to provide the following high-level features:

• User’s management and roles
• Web scraping for prices and products
• Tracking of website updates
• Gathered data visualization
• Notifications service.

We were far not new in Web Scraping, but there was a specific challenge full task: we should’ve recognized the numbers in the image content and consider them valuable data in specific scenarios. We used our experience with a third party image recognition API to solve this task and managed to launch the MVP to production.

We’ve got a lot of positive and useful feedback from the first customers that helped us improve the product further after the launch. Currently, the software is still in the pilot version, but it is definitely super useful for any e-commerce marketer, it has great market potential, infinite possibilities to scale and we’re happy to be part of it.