Company

Founded in 2016, Seelk empowers global brands with sharp expertise and cutting-edge technology to help them achieve sustainable business success on the Amazon ecosystem. Started by an ex-Amazon manager and a computer science engineer, Seelk has helped their clients consistently outperform Amazon’s average annual growth rate. Some of Seelk’s most well-known clients include stationery company, Bic, and household goods manufacturer, Church and Dwight.

In addition to their agency business, Seelk has also created Seelk Studio, an all-in-one SaaS analytics tool that allows Amazon vendors and sellers to track business KPIs, analyze data by different levels, visualize data in real-time and rank competitors with keyword and category tracking.

Nathaniel Daudrich, Product Manager, and Olivier Sturbois, Lead Front-end Developer, both work on the Seelk Studio app. “Although Seelk Studio is relatively new in the market, our client-facing employees are also using the software to make informed decisions, so it serves as a terrific stomping ground for testing features and iterations in the product,” said Nathaniel.

“When it comes to KPIs, we care a lot about stickiness. We track weekly active users (WAU) and divide that by our monthly active users (MAU),” said Olivier.

Challenge

The Seelk Studio team developed a Logistics app to make it easier to collect product order data, analyze and report on it to stakeholders. “Our team was very excited about this app, and our client strategists were ready to put it through the paces with client-specific use cases. Post-launch, we held workshops to educate our team about the core functionalities,” said Nathaniel.

“Mixpanel’s Insights report is a quick way for us to see how users behave in our software: where are they going? Are they encountering problems?” said Olivier. “Unfortunately, we saw that our analysts were not adopting the app as much as we had expected.”

Solution

The product team decided to dedicate workshops to re-defining the Logistics uses cases to understand why the internal staff were not using the app and found that it was missing several crucial functionalities.

“When Amazon requests purchase orders, there are two types: open or closed. Our data team needed to correctly aggregate this data, so that our analytics tool could easily calculate missed sales from our API,” said Nathaniel. “After conducting several workshops, we built a feature that allows users to drill down from country to brand to product-specific levels and analyze where they missed sales over specific periods of time. This was a game-changer for our business analysts.”

Result

With Mixpanel, Seelk realized a 120% increase in adoption in their logistics app in just a few weeks.

Why Seelk loves Mixpanel

Comparing employee and customer behavior with Cohorts

“Mixpanel’s Cohorts feature was a game changer for us since we have both employees and customers utilizing our software. With Cohorts, we can categorize the behaviors of our employees and our customers into separate groups, and compare them against each other. This provides us with more insights into what our customers need compared to our staff. As a result, we found out that our customers want to use Seelk Studio for decision-making, while our agency staff uses it more for analysis and reporting.”

Enabling shareholder reporting

“We recently joined Webedia Group, a global media and technology company specializing in the recreation and entertainment industries. Compared to our many well-established sister companies, we realised that we are a relatively new product team. Nonetheless, with Mixpanel, we have the ease and confidence to effectively report to our shareholders on top-tier analytics KPIs, including stickiness, retention and churn.”

General advice

It’s always important to be data-informed, even as an early-stage startup

“If you’re an early-stage startup, you may wonder if it’s too early to be adopting an analytics platform. Our experience has taught us that it’s never too early to begin instilling this data-informed ethos into your culture. Start building those muscles!

Learning from your data will help you and your team gain clarity on whether a decision was correct or not. If you’re able to see when, where, how, and at what frequency your features are being adopted, that’s going to lead to faster decision-making internally.”

Don’t be afraid to (diplomatically) challenge your customers when interviewing them

“As an early-stage startup, we have the luxury of being able to develop our product hand-in-hand with our customers. There are so many valuable insights to be gained from talking to them and asking them why they’re not adopting a certain feature. However, a common pitfall during these interviews is that customers will tell you what they think you want to hear. That’s not going to get you any closer to making a decision.

If you have product analytics, you already know if a user is using a feature or not. These interviews are meant to get to the why, so we can continue making tweaks, then measure the data again.

The goal is to get as much brutally honest feedback as possible. So we’ll challenge our users a bit. We’ll ask questions like, “What’s the use case on that?” which puts them in a situation where they need to further explain themselves. This is much more effective than just asking the user what needs to get fixed in the product.”