Bob Moore

You just kind of click a few buttons, you get the value out and you move on.

And for analytics, that's actually a lot of pieces.

So RJ Metrics, to make it work, we had to build a huge data pipeline infrastructure where we could extract data from all the places that people's data might live, like their shopping carts and their advertising platforms and their backend databases.

Then we also had to have a place to put that data.

So we had to build a data warehouse that would house all that data when we pulled it out, that could live on our infrastructure, that we could worry about scaling and making sure the queries work fast.

And then we had to build all the stuff you think about when you think of analytics, which is the dashboards and all of the components that allow you to make custom reports and have alerts and things like that.

So it was kind of this three-part stack.

And it worked great in certain industries, particularly in e-commerce.

But

As the market evolved, and because we were a company that was bootstrapped at first and around for a pretty long time, we kind of got almost lapped on the technology side in that there were pieces of that stack where entirely new generations of technology came out that actually broke the stack apart and made the best practice completely different from an implementation standpoint.

And probably the biggest thing in that world was this thing called Amazon Redshift, which is a data warehousing platform that

store large amounts of data in the cloud.

Redshift and later Google BigQuery and companies like Snowflake innovated on this model.

Basically,

If you think about that data warehouse as being like in the middle of the stack, what RJ Metrics was, it broke our stack right in half because no one wanted to use our little piece of a data warehouse that we built for analytics.

They wanted to have their data in their Redshift cloud in AWS or in their GCP cloud.

Yeah.

So what we ended up doing is really kind of hunkering down.

And what we watched happen was

we really just started selling just to the markets where they didn't have as much of an investment in owning that stack themselves.