EP16: Predictive Marketing; w/ Ömer Artun, founder & CEO, AgilOne (acq. by Acquia) — Product Market Fit

As our special guest this week, we have Ömer Artun, who founded AgileOne in 2006 and held the CEO role until he sold it to Acquia in 2019. Now he's pursuing his dream of running his own restaurant. Omer explains how to leverage customer data to anticipate their needs, preferences, and behaviors. During our conversation, he also gave us some insight into his experience building, scaling, and selling AgileOne. He emphasizes the importance of having “grit as startups don't fail because it's a bad idea or Startups only fail if the founder gives up”. 

Timestamps: 

(00:00) Intro
(03:20) Appeal for Turkey
(04:40) How did you get into predictive marketing and why did you start AgilOne?  
(06:52) The early days of AgileOne
(09:40) Today's data infrastructure (Snowflake, AWS, etc)
(14:15) Leveraging predictive marketing across acquisition, activation, and retention
(22:39) Retention & churn data points for SaaS businesses
(24:27) Customer LTV vs. upside potential; and uplift modeling
(27:27) Attribution modeling (and leveraging LTV)
(32:07) Defining LTV cohorts and payback period
(35:25) Getting started with predictive analytics
(36:55) Leveraging customer data in a privacy-first world
(38:48) Raising VC funding for AgileOne and selling the company
(41:56) Founders vs VCs: misalignment of incentives
(46:02) The burden of entrepreneurship
(47:25) Generative AI and augmented analytics
(49:05) Lightning Round
(54:00) Conclusion

Guest contact info:
omer@artun.com 

Support Turkey:
Ahbap Organization: https://ahbap.org/disasters-turkey

Sponsor:
This podcast is brought to you by grwth.co. Grwth offers fractional CMOs, paired with best-in-class digital marketing execution to support early-stage startup success. With a focus on seed and series A companies, Grwth has helped a number of SaaS, digital health, and e-commerce startups build their go-to-market function and scale up.
To learn more and book a free consultation, go to grwth.co. 

Get in touch with Mosheh:
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