Uscreen knows how to build a high-growth subscription business, and they built a customer-facing data product to help the content creators on their platform do the same.
Since fully migrating from their homegrown solution to Omni’s embedded analytics for their customer-facing data product, Uscreen has built a faster, more extensive analytics experience to help creators engage their communities and grow their businesses. This transformation has earned deeper trust from customers, transformed Uscreen’s analytics into a strategic advantage, and opened up new revenue opportunities with advanced user tiers.
Results #
Within 30 days, a team of 3 migrated all existing reports and built a more robust suite of customer-facing dashboards
Growth & Analytics team achieved OKRs of transforming their data product into a strategic competitive advantage
Uscreen’s customers are “delighted”; they can now learn more about what content engages their community and what actions will grow their subscription business
Pain Points #
Technical barriers delayed development. Creating reports previously required the technical expertise of developers, which took them away from building other parts of the product — causing delays in shipping new features and answering customer questions. Because of this, building out additional analytics features was often deprioritized.
Challenges establishing trust in the data & understanding customer usage. Because of the technical burden of updating in-app analytics, supplemental reports were built ad-hoc via Metabase and shared as CSVs with customers. However, metrics across reports were often inconsistent, making it difficult for Uscreen customers to trust which actions would help them grow their business. Additionally, this made it impossible to track which information was helpful to customers or include metric documentation to help customers understand what they were looking at.
Limited self-service without Customer Success team support. Difficulty accessing data forced customers to rely on their Customer Success Managers for tactical service requests instead of partnering with them as a strategic resource to grow their business.
Data Stack #
The Challenge #
The Uscreen Growth & Analytics team set a goal: increase trust with their customers by transforming their in-product analytics from a basic offering to a strategic tool, giving customers actionable insights to grow their communities and businesses.
Previously, customer-facing reports were built natively into the Uscreen product by the same developers who were in charge of shipping all product features. However, this created delays in releasing new features and caused their analytics offering to fall behind customer requests.
“There were data quality issues and technical barriers to development. The pipeline for customer-facing analytics was Product Managers > Analysts > Developers. By the time a developer wrote the query, it wasn’t done through the lens of the customer; it was very logical but not in a way our users would interpret it. Because of this, our entire analytics queue was customer requests for more data made by our CSMs.” Joe Horowitz, VP of Growth & Analytics
To answer customer requests for additional data, Uscreen Customer Success Managers would often run ad-hoc queries via Metabase — taking up valuable time that could be used to help customers grow their businesses, instead of responding to tactical data questions. Additionally, metrics in these reports were often inconsistent with those presented in the product, and there was no way for customers to interact and further explore their data.
“Beyond data quality issues, interactivity was an issue. When customers saw they had X number of active users, we wanted them to see who those users were so they could engage with them. We knew part of building trust with our customers was helping them discover answers on their own; we wanted them to see our team as a strategic resource for their growth.” Pete Petrin, Senior Analytics Manager
The Evaluation #
Because of its low price tag and the team’s familiarity with the tool, Metabase was Uscreen’s first consideration for building out its customer-facing analytics. But, early prototypes made it clear that Metabase “wasn’t sufficient for the type of experience we wanted to offer our customers,” Joe described.
“Our journey into Omni was about looking for a partner to help us redefine analytics as a product so we could drive value and growth for our customers.” Pete Petrin, Senior Analytics Manager
While they don’t typically implement enterprise software, they set out to find a partner who would help them deliver the most value to their customers. Along the way, they evaluated Looker, Sigma, Periscope, Embeddable, and Omni. Their search criteria included a solution that would:
Build customer trust with interactive, self-service reporting and granular visibility into which levers to pull for growth.
Integrate with their current tech stack, including leveraging the models they already had in dbt & making it easy to update documentation.
Provide flexibility for their team to have full visibility and control over their business logic & customer experience, while enabling developers to focus on their core product instead of analytics.
Deliver value with a price that works for their business model & a team to serve as partners in supporting their customers.
“We want to own our business logic, so the dbt <> git workflow works well for us. None of the other vendors seemed to offer that flexibility, but Omni’s bi-directional dbt integration really stood out to us as something that aligned with our philosophy. Beyond technical alignment, Omni seemed like the right partner as a company; it was by far the best sales experience I’ve had. I believe in the future with Omni.” Joe Horowitz, VP of Growth & Analytics
After a detailed evaluation, which included rebuilding existing reports in Metabase and Omni for a direct 1:1 comparison, Uscreen selected Omni.
The Migration #
Everything moved fast - the alpha version was ready for early customers in just one week. The Uscreen team was especially pleased that the quality of Omni support didn’t change between pre- and post-sales; their team always had direct access to Omni engineers and roadmap discussions.
“The migration to Omni far exceeded expectations in terms of what we were able to get done and how fast we could do it. The whole setup with getting onboarded and having direct access to Omni engineers was the best experience, and it’s continued beyond the POC.” Joe Horowitz, VP of Growth & Analytics
Additionally, the implementation calmed any lingering fears the Uscreen team had about losing control over the look and feel of their customer experience by going with an embedded analytics software instead of building everything in-house, calling Omni’s integration into their product “seamless.”
“The flexibility of Markdown elements in Omni really surprised us and helped with additional dashboard customization we wanted to do. As we’ve gone deeper into the product, we’ve been able to set up more customization, including conditional CTAs that depend on which features a particular customer has enabled. It’s helped us use our embedded analytics as a quasi-marketing tool.” Joe Horowitz, VP of Growth & Analytics
The Impact #
Rebuilt a more robust customer-facing data product in less than 30 days
Within 30 days, Uscreen rebuilt their entire customer-facing data product with Omni into something “far better” for customers to engage with, Joe says.
90% of the work was done by just three people: Pete (senior analytics manager), a data engineer, and a data analyst. The other 10% included a designer fine-tuning the visuals, a product manager leading the launch timeline, and Joe driving the high-level strategy.
“Omni created a pipeline from our Growth & Analytics team directly to our customers, allowing us to deliver massive value quickly. The fact that we had something ready to test in one week, iterated, and fully launched a new offering in a month is insane. This also allows our Product team to focus on what they do best: building value for our customers.” Joe Horowitz, VP of Growth & Analytics
Transformed analytics from a cost center to a customer-favorite product offering
With Omni reports embedded into Uscreen, customers are “delighted” with the analytics product — praising the Growth & Analytics team for faster access to deeper information about their businesses, including new benchmark reports which would have been too “cumbersome” to create before.
In a recent customer survey, Uscreen’s customers called the new analytics a “wonderful improvement” and “an epic upgrade.” One customer said the new analytics are “...massively helpful…I like the new features and I appreciate you guys so much that, you know, you listen to what we need."
“Since implementing Omni, our analytics offering is something we lead with during go-to-market initiatives because we know we have best-in-class analytics compared to any of our competitors. This shows up in unprompted feedback we get from users. They’re thanking us for the new analytics! We’ve achieved our OKR to transform our analytics into a customer delight.” Joe Horowitz, VP of Growth & Analytics
Now, the Uscreen team is developing an advanced offering to allow their most engaged customers to dig into their data even more with Omni’s Create Mode (self-service reports). “Naturally, when you give people data, they have more questions, so we’re excited to give customers the ability to explore even further,” Joe shared.
Earned customer trust by increasing velocity for analytics & product development
Since working with Omni, the Uscreen team has been surprised by the visibility and speed of product development. Pete cited instances when Omni engineers asked what he wanted to accomplish and then quickly launched features to help the team do just that.
“The velocity and autonomy that Omni gave our team — even just from the POC to the beta — was massive. We were able to overhaul everything so quickly. Now, we’re able to embed analytics into our product without any further developer support.” Pete Petrin, Senior Analytics Manager