The Varos Story

Business Planning for eCommerce and SaaS companies is outdated

To be “data-driven” hasn’t changed much in the past few years. If you’re a typical data-driven ecommerce or SaaS business, here’s how you probably plan your marketing activities: 

You look at dashboards & reports of your top KPIs including CAC, LTV, retention rates, conversions and traffic. You compare KPIs in those dashboards to your own historical data. If conversions go up or costs go down, you know that you’ve done a good job.

This process doesn't give you any visibility into what's going on with similar companies to you, so you’re really flying blind and it makes no sense.

That’s why you (or your boss) often ask things like: “are we really doing a good job, for a company like ours? Is that 6% conversion rate… actually good? Is a 10% increase in CAC post-IOS 14 bad? Are my creatives performing strong enough? Did everyone’s CTR decrease last week too, or was that just us?” 

You simply need to know how you stack up to similar companies and how you’re trending vs. them in order to answer those questions. 

So you go ahead and ask around to see what the benchmarks are compared to similar companies. You search Google, which always has months-old or years-old information, with super broad categories. Or, if you’re lucky enough to have a friend with a similar company, you ask them for their anecdotal perspective.. 

But there are so many companies out there, just like yours, who are also measuring traffic, conversions, costs and signups. How is it possible that you can’t reliably know what numbers they’re seeing? It makes no sense.

It doesn’t have to be this way

Now, all of the big marketing platforms - Facebook, Google, Shopify, etc - have app stores that make it easy to connect and analyze data. And there are well-known protocols out there to keep data secure. 

Other industries are light-years past us. There’s a company that crowdsources HR data to let HR people know how much employees at other companies are paid. There’s a company that crowdsources from hotel management systems to tell hotel operators how much similar hotels are charging per night.

Introducing the Varos Community

We said enough is enough, and so we’ve established the first community of crowdsourced and anonymized KPIs for ecommerce and SaaS companies. It’s a type of cooperative commerce. 

Today, any company doing digital marketing can easily connect into our anonymized data hub, and see in real-time how their metrics compare to similar companies to theirs. 

For example, if you’re a DTC apparel company in the US spending $100K per month on Facebook Ads, you can now see how your customer acquisition costs compare to companies like yours. Or, if you’re a skincare company with a $30 AOV, you can see how your return rate compares to other companies like yours. And the list goes on...

All data in the hub is anonymous and aggregated and secured using enterprise-grade encryption protocols.

No one is the best at everything; we’ve all got something to gain and learn. By knowing where you stack up compared to similar companies, you can now understand your gaps, your strengths and be smarter about where you focus your efforts. 

Realizing your growth potential starts by knowing what’s possible. Join our community and fly to the moon.

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About the Author

Yarden Shaked

Co-founder & CEO at Varos

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