“We migrated from Segment when we realized that MetaRouter allows us to minimize the resources we’re spending yet continue to make fully informed decisions as a company.” -Jaeseung Yum, CEO of Tumblbug

For independent content creators, success—if not survival—depends on funding projects and building a fan base. But when Jaeseung Yum was a film major in college, he realized there was no clear path to generating support. To solve that problem, he founded Tumblbug, a Korean online crowdfunding site.

Tumblbug does more than source funding, though. Yes, users can submit projects under a variety of categories: art, cartoon, design, fashion, film, cooking, publishing, technology or music. But they can also discover and connect with whole communities of potential fans and even collaborate with other artists. 

Offering funding, community and collaboration successfully requires Tumblbug to have a deep knowledge of who’s interacting with the site, and how. With that, they can guide artists toward the communities that would likely best pair with their projects—and fans toward the projects that best fit their interests. 

Tumblbug’s Challenge

Tumblbug’s Engineering Manager, Rock Kang, explains that their challenge is to understand exactly what’s successful on their site, and for whom, and make decisions quickly. This requires constantly A/B testing different features and deeply analyzing user reactions. Of course, gathering data to enhance the user experience on both ends (content generators and their audiences) is a must. 

But Tumblbug takes it a step further. Their goal is to turn this data back to their users.

“In South Korea,” Rock says, “not many tech companies are particularly transparent and data-driven, so we want that communication with our customers to be our competitive edge—helping better position them to sell their content.” 

Analyzing customer engagement for two audiences for both internal and external use means Tumblbug needed to understand every detail of every interaction- like how long people are on their page, who those people are, where they’re coming from, what content they keep coming back to, and more. And they wanted to be able to query this data from one interface. 

They quickly realized they didn’t have the infrastructure to handle all the data for their tools on their own. Tumblbug began streaming data with Segment, which delivered the functionality they needed. The pricing structure, however, was becoming a burden on their business. 

Enter, MetaRouter.

The MetaRouter Solution

From the get-go, MetaRouter was the perfect fit. They offered every integration Tumblbug needed at a price that made sense for their business model. Through MetaRouter's suite of data destinations, they discovered several tools that enabled new methods of tracing the entire customer journey, from past purchasing activity to present behavior. 

MetaRouter, it turned out, is the perfect foundation to stream both clickstream data and data from MySQL to Amazon Redshift, a data warehouse destination. This allows them to analyze more deeply than even their favorite tools allow. Options like Google Analytics are great resources, but their metric calculations can sometimes present black-box methodologies. For example, when a customer is "retained" in a Cohort Analysis, what is the criteria used determine that categorization? By streaming their valuable event data to Redshift, Tumblbug can apply their own logic to create the custom graphs and models they need to make fully informed decisions. 

Rock explains, “If someone clicked on a button somewhere and we track their user ID with custom analytics.js, we’re now also able to join that with MySQL data to see what their email is, what they purchased previously, etc. Basically, the full picture.”

Now, with MetaRouter, Tumblbug can easily answer pointed questions, like “For the people who came in through Facebook, who made a purchase on their first visit and how many of their users ended up coming back later?” and “Where did those users go when they came back a second time?” In other words, they can dig into customer behavior in a centralized database and make decisions based on data sets that are customized to their specific needs.

MetaRouter has done what they promised: made Tumblbug’s customer data infrastructure “dead simple”— for a price that makes sense.

With MetaRouter, Tumblbug uses all the tools they love best and can route all user behavior data to a single location for a 360° view of their customers. Not only can Tumblbug understand how to make their product more effective, but they can now offer transparency to content creators on how to best position and market their projects. This gives Tumblbug a distinct competitive advantage for the foreseeable future.

Sound familiar? See how MetaRouter could solve your challenges with data. Share your pain points with us at hello@metarouter.io. We'll respond right away!

Photo by Micheile Henderson on Unsplash