Unlocking real-time behavioral data in SaaS: Tim Harrison speaks to Snowplow Analytics' Yali Sassoon
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What inspired Yali Sassoon to co‑found Snowplow and how did the company get its start?
The big breakthroughs of the times the data really makes a difference is often not in the analysis, it's in the question you ask. If you ask an interesting question and then use data to answer it, that's when you really drive
value. Hello everyone and welcome to Orbit, the H D podcast series where we speak to leaders and innovators from across the software and technology ecosystem discussing the key trends changing how we all do business. I'm Tim Harrison, a specialist in HE's data science and analytics team. And today I'm delighted to be joined by Yani Sassoon, co-founder of SnowPow Analytics. SnowPow enables businesses to unlock data to better understand their customers, and I've invited Yali to discuss how businesses can use data science to best leverage this customer behaviour data and product telemetry. So before we dive in, Yali, why don't we kick off and you can introduce yourself properly and perhaps tell us the story of how SmokePower got started.
Thanks very much, Tim. Hello, everybody. My name is uh Yali, as Tim has already alluded to. I'm a a data guy, so I've been a data guy all my life. If we go very far back in time, I studied maths and science at university and then History and philosophy of science, and then I was really fundamentally interested in how Over the period of centuries, we learned to reason about more and more disciplines as human beings in a kind of a numeric and numbers-driven way. So when I finished university, I got into consultancy and that was a good opportunity to take a systematic kind of scientific approach to understanding how businesses work and use data to help them work better. I did that as a strategy consultant and operations consultant.
I then got a chance to work actually in a tech company in a startup where I had a little passion in in the UK in a company called OpenADS that later became OpenX. Um and then ten years ago I co founded Snowplow. And at the time My co founder Alex and I, we were consultants. We were working with a lot of businesses in the UK, so we're both based in London. Helping them really do digital product development and customer marketing more effectively and showing how data could be used to do both of those things more effectively. And one of the data sets that we're really excited about were behavioral data. So we work with customers who in many cases were very used to using transactional data, loyalty cards and those sorts of things to understand and segment their customer base.
Uh, based on what they bought, and that could tell you a lot. But we were really interested in using behavioral data uh to better understand uh customers, to better track them through more of their journey. You know, not just what products have they bought, but which have they shown an interest in and where had they shown an interest in as an example. And what we realized in 2012 was the technology possibilities for. uh creating and processing that data at scale that was becoming a lot lot easier because of kind of open source big data technologies like Hadoop which no one really talks about anymore but was huge in in 2012 and cloud services things like Amazon Web Services that made it easy for you know, people with small budgets like the two of us to go and spin up these clusters and use them to help our customers process really large volumes of data.
So that was really exciting. That led us to start Snowplow. And the idea behind Snowplow when we started in 2012 was to enable any business to collect granular behavioral data from their website. We were primarily web focused at the beginning and warehouse that data and then ask any question that they wanted of that data themselves. So our customers were using Google Analytics and site catalyst at the time. And those tools would enable customers to collect that data. But it forced them to use that data to do very specific things, to do conversion rate optimization or to optimize their digital marketing spend. And we really felt like there was a load more possibility that could be done with this data.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What inspired Yali Sassoon to co‑found Snowplow and how did the company get its start?
0:01–6:09
2
Why did Snowplow choose an open‑source model and how did that shape its early growth?
6:09–11:18
3
How does granular behavioral data unlock insights that traditional analytics (e.g., Google Analytics) can’t provide?
11:18–17:23
4
What are practical examples of using behavioral data for product‑level decisions like churn prediction and upsell opportunities?
17:23–21:37
5
How can SaaS companies move from simple attribution to real‑time, data‑driven product experiences?
21:37–26:52
6
What organizational challenges (people, process, data quality) must be tackled to scale behavioral analytics?
26:52–32:36
7
What emerging trends (real‑time pipelines, modern data stack, AI/ML) will shape the future of behavioral data?
32:36–37:26
8
What advice does Yali give to businesses starting their behavioral data journey and measuring ROI?
37:26–42:46
Speakers
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