Most ecommerce agencies provide either software or services; very few offer both. At Tadpull, we combine the two in a unique and strategic way. Our services team built our software. There’s no disconnect between the engineers and data scientists who created our proprietary tools and our services team who leverage them for predictable growth. We engineered The Pond hand-in-hand with our clients and have an intimate understanding of how data insights can inform actions that drive revenue in days and not months.
We also focus on developing and tweaking our software to evolve with changing times, markets, and client needs. We didn’t build it simply to generate revenue through subscriptions. We built it to give our client’s an edge with better first-party customer data and predictive insights—and the combination of software and services gives us the full picture of what an ecommerce business needs in a changing marketplace.
Our software team knows ecommerce services and our ecommerce services team knows software. Our clients benefit as a result of this rare union.
We built software based on ecommerce services
Not only is our software built by scientists, it’s built for customers. We started more than a decade ago in our basement, building custom websites and making them perform with diversified traffic over the long term. We always loved math and coding, and wanted to build product, but we knew that would take time to perfect, so we focused on services first. This period injected a core of customer-centricity into the DNA of the company: we had great referrals, happy clients, and a deep understanding of what our customer needed for data and workflows. After four years, we used the insights from our services experience to help hone our product offering.
Developing The Pond presented a massive opportunity. We knew what our clients wanted and we knew how to create software that could harness data to help ecommerce businesses grow. Put a group of data scientists with experience in services in a room together and you end up with the most customer-centric software out there.
We’ve also been adjunct professors since 2007. We create and teach college classes about data science and ecommerce, so we’re always thinking about helping people experiencing data in interesting ways to take meaningful action. Many marketers don’t like to work with data—not only do we love working with data, we figured out how to make it more impactful for driving profitability and growth to the client. That’s the mix of software and services, delivered with the academic rigor of a professor and the practical experience of a business owner.
Combining software and services allows companies to move quickly
We always preach our 4 C’s of Ecommerce Flywheel Framework(™): culture, catalog, customers, and campaigns. When those four are working in concert, you can make decisions quickly—all based on data—and get compounding results.
Let’s say we identified something based on your catalog data—a product is selling well with a high margin—on a Monday. We can work on the campaign Tuesday, send out the email Wednesday, and have the data to review on Friday. In five business days, your company went from insight to execution to generating cash. And the Pond data will show what’s working, what’s not, and where to continue investing.
Imagine trying to do that with an external software partner and an external services partner. First, the software and data science team would have to share their data and insights with the services team. Assembling all that data and then analyzing it would take enormous time. Everything is going to happen piecemeal; the communication loop alone could take weeks. It could take a month or even a whole quarter to arrive at a data-driven decision. With Tadpull, it’s one very well-oiled machine focused on growth and profitability.
Empathy and logic is the Tadpull difference
We believe in our software, but everything we do comes back to empathy. We don’t just parse data and tell you what to do. We really listen to our clients. We have a conversation, almost like a trusted coach or favorite professor. We’ll ask you what is working and what isn’t, and why you think that might be happening. Then we’ll help you figure out the truth.
That’s the emotional part of the business. From a logistics standpoint, our services team is organized, approachable, highly-trained, and we hit deadlines. We employ understanding and empathy to bring our clients along on the data journey. We show them how and explain to them why the data our software is generating is driving the recommendations we’re making—in the most human possible way. Contrast this with other experiences in the technology industry where clients are rarely seen as true equals and partners. Meetings are confrontational and condescending. That client experience doesn’t fly with us.
At Tadpull, we know that successful ecommerce is a little bit science and a little bit art, a little bit software and a little bit services. We trust the data to do its job and the humans to do theirs. At the end of the day, after all, we’re on the same team.