The Pitch

Startup Name *	MineWhat: An eCommerce Intelligence Company
What problem are you solving?	With over 100,000 eCommerce companies (and growing), it’s hard to stand out. They all process large volumes of data and they need to make sense of how to use it when making decisions. Not everyone understands analytics or how to create the insights from numbers. At MineWhat, we think they shouldn’t have to.Our app is for people who aren’t analysts and prefer to see their data connecting their shopper segments to their products, brands, and categories. We realised that the existing analytics tools weren’t designed with the needs of eCommerce companies in mind. So, we created one designed just for them, and it’s easy to use too.
What is your solution?	Product level insights are what eCommerce companies need to better understand consumer behaviour and the interactions on their site. This is exactly what we give them. With our innovative features, marketers and merchandisers can make better informed decisions to reach their business goals. With us, there’s no coding and we visually connect data right down to the SKU level.
Why is this a great opportunity?	eCommerce is a growing industry and we saw a gap between what these companies needed in terms of analytics tools to what was available to them in the market. We wanted to be the solution and fill in that gap.
Target Market	Small to large eCommerce firms, especially those based out of the United States or Europe. We’ve gone global and have noticed our app being especially useful for those who work in marketing or in merchandising.
How will you make money?	When our clients sign up for our app, we generate revenue through their monthly subscription plan.
Founders Names	Ram and Pavan
Website	http://minewhat.com/
What type of funding has the company received	Venture Capital/ Private Equity

Startup88 Verdict

The problem MineWhat is solving is real. Making decisions on what to sell based on yield, conversion rates, profit etc is impossibly difficult to scale manually. Most eccomerce sites with any volume have to build their own systems to manage this, but this isn’t an option for the smaller end of town.

Google Analytics is not really setup to provide analytics based on the profitability and the success at a product level of your store so it seems to me there is a decent market which in all likelihood will continue to see growth for the foreseeable future as more and more small and medium businesses launch online stores and more and more retailers realised that they may not be able to stay in business in traditional retailing.

The founders Janakiram Ganesan and Pavan Kumar moved the company from Bangalor, India to Arkansas after and have raised The Ark Challenge an accelerator based in Arkansas and have raised their first (undisclosed) round of capital from Gravity Ventures.

While it still looks like early days for these guys they seem to have their problem and solution well defined, the market they are selling too are willing pay if they can convince customers that they will see a return on their investment, the question is can they attract and acquire customers in a cost effective campaign, it would seem to me this will be the biggest challenge, I would suspect that they will almost certainly have to send sales reps out into the field to hit reasonable sized merchants, this costs a lot of money to acquire new customers and speaking from personal experience trying to find people who are able to create new enterprise and business sales opportunities is not trivial.

If they can use online signup for their smaller clients and build a broad base of small clients this could be very scalable, while the direct team brings in the larger clients this could turn out to be a good enterprise business.