story

MessageMe uses Looker to drive engagement with data throughout the company.

The Challenge: Make data analysis fast and easy so that anyone in the company can engage with data on a regular basis.

The Solution: Looker provides virtually instant analysis of key metrics and enables easy reuse and customization by the business team.

The Upshot: Improved growth, cost savings, and reduced burden on data specialists—freeing up technical talent for product development.

Applying Data Quickly to Every Aspect of Business

MessageMe is a fast-growing startup with an all-in-one iOS, Android, and web messaging service used by 10 million people. Their solution enables messaging and sharing of pictures, videos, and gifs, as well as “doodles”—art that users create with their touchscreen or mouse.

Looker enables anyone in the company to engage with detailed, up-to-the-minute user data to understand how to grow the service. As they explore user behavior and retention, they’re equipped to make decisions about just about every aspect of their business—whether it’s the carriers they use to send SMS messages, the sources they explore to fi nd new users, or even the emoticons they provide for users to express themselves.

Looker helps us understand the simplest expression of what’s important for our business. At the same time, it tells us how we think about our product.

—Arjun Sethi, Co-Founder and CEO Try Looker for free. Or schedule a demo at: looker.com/contact-sales 1 The Challenge

MessageMe initially used MySQL to store usage data, but quickly outgrew it. With many terabytes of data, their choice was either to shard or move to Redshift. Now they store a small amount of transactional data in MySQL and everything else in Redshift. They track the success of ad campaigns, new user retention rates, numbers and frequency of Looker definitely takes a lot off my messages sent and content shared, how many invites users send to plate. Instead of having to build our others to join MessageMe, and more. It’s split according to multiple own dashboards, I can focus on dimensions, including demographics, device types, and geography. actually building a better product. Businesspeople around MessageMe are curious to explore all this data, —Justin Rosenthal, Co-Founder and CTO to distinguish meaningful patterns from random events. But with data stored in billions of rows, their questions would ordinarily require the skills of a data analyst, not to mention the turnaround time associated with the request. They wanted to get their own hands on the data, so they could discover for themselves if their questions would lead to valuable information.

MessageMe needed a solution that gave businesspeople free run of all data, while freeing up the data team to focus on product development. Most of all, they needed data to be engaging, so business users would explore data without hesitation and without high-overhead involvement from data people.

The Solution

Looker proved to be a natural solution. As an Amazon Web Services (AWS) partner, Looker connects directly to Redshift without having to ETL data. So MessageMe has been able to build its own Looker-based big data analytics cloud in just a few clicks. Also, Looker’s curiosity-driven Looker helps MessageMe understand how data discovery platform empowers businesspeople to pose their own consumers are engaging with their product questions—with little or no assistance from engineers or data analysts— and what features drive retention. and then easily reuse them later.

Redshift’s fully managed, petabyte-scale data warehouse service enables fast, cost-effective innovation. To make queries more effi cient, MessageMe data scientists summarize Redshift data, turning the billions of rows of user data into the hundreds of rows that interest the business team. For compute-intensive queries, such as daily user retention, they summarize the data they have in Redshift and build Looker models on top of the summarized tables. This step makes the data much more usable, giving the organization the ability to compute complex analytics easily. Anyone in the company can write their own Looker queries with minimal help (or even no help) from the data team and enjoy virtually instantaneous answers to their questions—removing an element of frustration that can often hinder businesspeople from engaging with data.

2 The Upshot

Looker enables the company to save time by transforming data on the fl y and building new models in seconds. And it saves money by letting businesspeople immediately shift resources in response to data, without having to wait days or weeks to develop useful analytics.

For example, MessageMe regularly uses Looker to measure retention rates from various sources around the web. By investing more in those sources that yield users who hang around—and by reducing or stopping promotions in sources that generate users who quickly drop off—they are able to maximize their advertising spend.

Another example relates to the choice of SMS providers that MessageMe uses to validate the phone numbers of new signups. Looking at conversions organized by SMS provider, the product team noticed that An illustrator at MessageMe uses Looker conversion rates varied widely by provider. Drilling into the data with to measure the popularity of the diff erent Looker, they observed that one SMS provider was delivering the validation Packs she creates. messages much more quickly than the others—which worked to engage the recent signups. They immediately shifted the bulk of their SMS traffi c to the high-performing provider, signifi cantly increasing adoption.

Because Looker makes data analysis so immediate, MessageMe staff regularly engage with data and use it to drive their next steps. An illustrator who creates the stickers that users attach to messages wanted to know what stickers were sent most often. With minimal help, she set up and saved a Looker query, and she runs it regularly. She determined Try Looker for free that people sent more romantic stickers than any others, and now she incorporates more “love” in the sticker packs she creates.

Thanks to the power of Looker, the entire set of MessageMe data is available to anyone in the company. Instead of getting analysts to looker.com/free-trial build time-consuming queries when they’re curious about something, businesspeople can ask questions independently and autonomously— and discover questions they might never have thought to ask.

For a fresh look at your own data, About Looker sign up for a free Looker trial. Looker is an inventive software company that’s pioneering the next generation of business intelligence (BI). We believe that businesses Just tell us how to connect to your can only thrive when data is consistently defi ned and easily accessible analytics database, and you’ll experience across the entire organization. the full Looker functionality free of charge. Our web-based platform powers the work of data analysts while fueling (and fulfi lling) the business user’s curiosity. Looker is creating true discovery-driven businesses and unlocking the value of their data, Or request a demo: one customer at a time. looker.com/contact-sales Looker is based in Santa Cruz, CA | looker.com

© 2014 Looker. All rights reserved. Looker and the Looker logo are trademarks of Looker Data Sciences, registered in the United States. Other trademarks are trademarks of their respective companies. All services 3 are subject to change or discontinuance without notice. January 2014