Neat Saves Engineering Resources, Amps Up Analytics

Data Stack

• Pipeline: Fivetran
• Sources: Facebook Ad Insights, Fivetran Log, Google Ads, Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Google Sheets, Jira, LinkedIn Ads, Mailchimp, Mixpanel, Postgres RDS, Twilio, Zendesk Chat, Zendesk Support
• Destination: Snowflake
• Business Intelligence: Tableau

Key Takeaways

• Fivetran saves the business an estimated $35,000 in the first year and about $5,000 per year thereafter
• Without Fivetran, Neat would have to dedicate one full-time employee to ELT
• Having centralized data has positively impacted analytics projects, including marketing, customer support and engineering analytics

Neat, headquartered in Hong Kong, is a digital wallet that makes international business a reality for entrepreneurs. The business generates data from multiple sources, including marketing applications, transactional databases and more. However, because data was siloed within the sources, the business struggled to paint a full picture of the customer.

Data Silos Limit Insights

Having used Fivetran at a previous company, Data Lead Giorgio Galvan knew it was the right solution for Neat to get its data into Snowflake, its warehouse of choice:

We tried some competitor products, but we never got to a point where we actually considered any of them. Fivetran is the most straightforward to use and scales with us in terms of speed, data growth and cost.

To prove the benefit of buying a solution over building internally, Galvan and Data Engineer SoonKhen "SK" OwYong conducted a cost-benefit analysis for the CFO. Through this analysis, they determined that to build and maintain the entire pipeline internally would take a minimum of 48 weeks of work and an additional employee. With Fivetran, it takes a few clicks to set up a connector and the data is ready to use within one or two days for most sources. As Galvan shares:

At a minimum, Fivetran is saving us 35,000 in our first year and about 5,000 a year thereafter – and these are our conservative estimates.

Understanding the Customer to Make the Right Decisions

Centralizing and joining data has expanded the breadth of analysis the business is able to do. Examples include:

Customer acquisition analytics: The business can join data from Mixpanel with Facebook and Google Ads data to understand and ultimately optimize cost per acquisition. When the data was siloed, it wasn’t possible to understand which ads or keywords were truly effective.

Customer lifetime value: With data from transactional databases, ad and support platforms, and more in a single location, Neat can more accurately determine the lifetime value of a customer and understand what behaviors or actions impact that number. For instance, how does the number of support tickets submitted, emails received or wait time for account approval impact a customer’s lifetime value?

Funnel analysis: By bringing together data that was previously siloed in Postgres databases, Neat has a much clearer understanding of when users are dropping off during sign-up and has created OKRs to reduce drop-off and increase conversion.

Customer support analytics: Previously, the data team built a few ETL jobs to Zendesk which were unreliable. With the Fivetran connector bringing the data into Snowflake, the data team can build reports that deliver impactful, real-time metrics for the customer support team.

Engineering analytics: Data from Jira helps the data team better analyze bugs and forecast product progress.

Building a Data Culture

Overall, the business is seeing quick adoption of dashboards and the growth of a data culture, from the individual departments up to the executive level. The data team is enabling other teams and individuals, such as customer support, to create their own reports so they can slice and dice the data. Galvan wants to empower the entire organization to use data:

“By empowering people to become more data-driven, we’re creating a strong data culture while also regaining the data team’s time to work on other challenges. We’re even beginning to conduct training for those who wish to learn new skills for their job, such as SQL.”

With Fivetran increasing speed to insights, Neat can make critical decisions more quickly and with more confidence while giving engineers the freedom to work on projects that have real business impact. OwYong puts it best:

If it wasn’t for Fivetran, I’d constantly be writing Airflow pipeline streams. Now, rather than doing that repetitive work I can use my skills to jump right into the data science side of the business. Fivetran makes data fun for engineers.

Check out our Resource Center to learn more about the benefits of Fivetran or get started for yourself with a free trial.

About Fivetran: Shaped by the real-world needs of data analysts, Fivetran technology is the smartest, fastest way to replicate your applications, databases, events and files into a high-performance cloud warehouse. Fivetran connectors deploy in minutes, require zero maintenance, and automatically adjust to source changes — so your data team can stop worrying about engineering and focus on driving insights.

About Snowflake: Snowflake delivers the Data Cloud — a global network where thousands of organizations mobilize data with near-unlimited scale, concurrency, and performance. Inside the Data Cloud, organizations unite their siloed data, easily discover and securely share governed data, and execute diverse analytic workloads. Join the Data Cloud. https://www.snowflake.com/

About Tableau: Tableau helps people see and understand their data. The Tableau platform provides the breadth and depth of capabilities that enterprises need, and adapts to your environment with unmatched flexibility and choice, while meeting the toughest governance and security requirements. People love using Tableau because it is both powerful and intuitive. Tableau leads the industry with the most passionate user community, over 86,000 customer accounts, and a commitment to customer-focused innovation.