At Michael Sengbusch’s former startup, he created tools to help healthcare marketers do a better job advertising their services and providers. But, though the product was solid, the CTO constantly found himself frustrated. The marketing teams that were using their product would log into their dashboards, see what had gone wrong with their campaigns — and do absolutely nothing.
“We were always confused about why marketing teams weren’t changing anything based off that data,” says Sengbusch. “We couldn’t figure out why we’d present all the trends, all the analytics, and all they would do is log into the platform, take a screenshot, paste it into a powerpoint and show it to the customer, and they would repeat that process every month.”
After that company, Brightwhistle, sold to Influence Health in 2015 for an estimated $20+ million, and Sengbusch finished out his requisite two years, he took some time to think through his next move. He took on a role at the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech, serving as CTO-in-Residence to mentor younger founders.
But he kept coming back to that marketing data problem. As evidenced by their successful acquisition, Sengbusch knew BrightWhistle had the data portion of the equation right. Why hadn’t the marketers been receptive?
“Then it occurred to me — it wasn’t the data, it was the delivery mechanism,” shares Sengbusch. In other words, the complex and tedious dashboards and platforms that dominate today’s martech landscape.
“Marketers are not data scientists, they’re not analysts, they’re not mathematicians. But a lot of marketing technology that’s being built seems to assume that they are,” he says. “They look at the dashboard and the metrics and it’s kind of like Greek to them. They need to know not what the data says or how to interpret it, but what to do about it.”
He set out to figure out the fastest, most effective way to deliver actionable insights to marketing teams in a way that would provide tangible results. After gathering feedback from potential customers, the team settled on their delivery mechanism: the popular messaging app Slack.
“Putting the product within the Slack channel… dramatically changed the level of responsiveness we were getting from potential customers and advisors,” he says.
“Rather than trying to bring the marketing team to the data, we’ll take the data to them, in a very distilled, easy-to-understand, collaborative, positive way.”
The startup, Eletype, gained some notoriety — along with initial funding — after participating in last quarter’s Atlanta Startup Battle investor competition.
Though Eletype wasn’t the first-choice winner, they did receive an investment from the competition’s host, Techsquare Labs, in a first-of-its-kind move for Startup Battle.
That funding helped the team of three build out their product further. They’re currently serving 30 paying companies in an open beta, and support marketing insights on Facebook advertising and Google AdWords campaigns, along with insights on landing page conversions.
Sengbusch’s ultimate goal for the tool is simplicity. Rather than showing marketing teams the dozens, if not hundreds, of metrics that can be measured on a marketing campaigns, it distills the data down to three or five metrics that need to be tweaked — things like audience saturation, demographics or landing page conversions.
“Rather than waiting for a campaign not to be good, we’re listening for hotspots and indications that a campaign might not be working, and sending it to them ahead of time,” explains Sengbusch. “If you pay attention to these things today, you could prevent a problem and your campaign will probably do better.”
Eletype charges per ad account (starting at $10 per month per account), so multiple members on the marketing team can receive the same insights from a campaign. The tool wires directly into the team’s Slack workspace and doesn’t cost extra when adding extra Slack channels.
Since the beta has been progressing well so far, Eletype is getting ready for an upcoming launch on Product Hunt to garner more users and get eyes on the tool. They’re also exhibiting at TechCrunch’s signature Disrupt event in September.
