The Power of A/B Testing as a Startup with Chetan Sharma of Eppo

The term A/B testing gets thrown around a lot in startups, many use it to great effect, and some know they should use it, but never quite do. Our guest today is Chetan Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO of Eppo, a platform that helps companies run useful, reliable experiments by automating the analysis, diagnostics, and investigations, all on top of your data warehouse. We get into the power of A/B testing, how Eppo can unlock that power for startups of all sizes, and best practices for implementing them.

About Chetan Sharma:Chetan Sharma is the Co-Founder and CEO of Eppo. Previously, he was Data Scientist at Webflow and Airbnb. Chetan worked in empirical healthcare policy, helping to craft metrics and incentive systems as part of the Affordable Care Act's pay-for-performance programs. He has BS and MS degrees from Stanford.

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In this episode we discuss:

02:25 Chetan’s journey into startups and data science03:46 His experience working at AirBnB06:56 How one of his projects at AirBnB became open source11:22 Chetan’s decision to take a year to travel before his next career move14:42 Why A/B testing is so popular at startups17:34 Some misconceptions around A/B testing21:31 Why companies struggle with A/B testing24:08 What happens when A/B gives inaccurate results26:38 Picking the right northstar metrics for your company to track29:32 How capital-constrained companies can use A/B testing to solve problems faster30:59 What Eppo does to make A/B testing better32:15 How Eppo works34:12 Why focusing your company to work on core products and not tools is important at early startups35:42 What early-stage startups can do to get more data38:04 The ROI of Eppo even in a recession39:39 The value-add of Eppo40:32 Customer case studies of Eppo42:43 Eppo’s new Cupid product46:13 Plans for the recent $16M Series A round backed by some of world’s leading data and  product investors like Menlo Ventures and Amplify Partners

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