Doing More with Less

Our last market downturn came almost 15 years ago when I founded my previous startup. We had completed a round of financing and this was the advice given to us by our board. I was in my twenties at the time, and this mostly meant putting in incredibly long hours. While we all learned a ton, we generally lacked sleep and had a work/life balance that was unsustainable. At the end of the day, we were able to do a bit more and we certainly had less. But our success came through sheer hustle and not through efficient (or smart) ways of getting things done.Fast forward to today. We’ve been on a steady crescendo requiring us “to do more” over the past couple of years. First, COVID forced rapid digitization as everything shut down. A rapid back-to-normal sprint then followed post-vaccine, only to once more slow down in the wake of the Omicron outbreak. We’ve seen unprecedented disruptions in supply chains affecting inventory levels, quality control, and shipping delays. And on top of all this, Google decided to deprecate third-party cookies, Apple introduced sweeping privacy changes with massive data implications, and Facebook performance has taken a nose-dive. So, we’ve all been doing a lot more over the past two-plus years. Enter 2022, and we’re officially in a bear market with strong signs of a recession. Budgets are cut, headcounts slashed, and there's an expectation to do *more* - but with a lot less.Time is now our most valuable resource - and while we all need to work harder & put in more hours, ultimately the only way to achieve your goals is by working smarter.This brings me back to my previous startup - and how hustle plus working harder can only go so far. Ultimately efficient ways of working are the only real ways of scaling your time. When I founded Simon Data seven years ago, I was drawn to what was perhaps the biggest source of organizational inefficiencies that I saw as a life-long data scientist and entrepreneur.

Enter Simon...

Data is hard. Data is complex. Data is messy. Data is slow! And for many marketing & business stakeholders, working with data is a highly inefficient and time-consuming process. We set out to build an application that would change all this. This vision started with streamlined access with fast & efficient workflows that required less effort - and ended with transformative outcomes to redefine brands, enable next-generation personalization, and drive incrementally more revenue.Many who look at my background will assume that Simon Data does this via data science, advanced AI, and other forms of rocket science. While they aren’t (completely) wrong, the secret sauce behind unlocking data at Simon starts with re-thinking how you work with your data. It’s all about re-defining workflows and putting the breadth & power of your customer data at your fingertips. Imagine a world where data operations requires to affect fine-grained segmentation, 1-1 personalization, and channel coordination could be complete in a few hours instead of the days or weeks it takes today. Imagine a world without the constant struggles to wrangle up the right data, to get your martech stack to do what they said it would, or to play peacemaker between your data, IT, and marketing teams.

This is the vision behind Simon - and here’s how it works:

Simon enables you to work faster with the data you already have. Perhaps the most frustrating & inefficient aspect of data is that you have the data already, somewhere within the four walls of your organization - yet you’re unable to easily access it. Simon solves this problem by integrating with your existing data & data systems. This starts with your data warehouse, includes real-time data from your web & mobile experiences, API data from your pricing or inventory systems, and data that’s siloed in Shopify, Zendesk, survey tools, or any other SaaS application. For us, data enablement means eliminating the Jira tickets, cross-functional meetings, and days or weeks of time required to extract data fields into your martech tools.Simon enriches your data to drive incremental revenue. This is where rocket science comes into play. Our machine learning capabilities make sense of the complexities of your data to drive results across the entire customer lifecycle - from acquisition propensity to churn probabilities and beyond. And with third party cookie changes and increasing pressures around acquisition costs, our Identity+ offering can stitch anonymous & known customer data together to increase conversion rates and drive incremental revenue - seamlessly into the Simon Data platform all with minimal time.Simon enhances your existing channels to maximize engagement. It plugs into all your channels from acquisition to retention, including owned, digital, and offline. Simon also transforms the segmentation, personalization, and targeting within existing systems - bringing them next to the data with incredible precision. What good is data if you can’t take it the last mile to drive highly engaged messaging?

My Challenge for You

Times like these are demanding for all. While we should accept that we all need to work a little harder, we must not forget that just working more hours won’t cut it. Time is your most valuable resource, and it is finite. I’d challenge every one of you to use these times to create more efficient processes & systems - and level up to a smarter way of working.