Understanding Consumer Behavior with Quantum Metric CEO Mario Ciabarra

10/05/20 • 49 min

Welcome back to How I Launched This, A SaaS Story. This week, Stephanie (@stephr_wong) has the pleasure of speaking with Mario Ciabarra, Founder and CEO of Quantum Metric. Quantum Metric specializes in collecting, analyzing, and understanding real-time consumer behaviors with regards to technology.

Mario, an entrepreneur from childhood with a background in molecular biology and biochemistry, has used his extensive skills as an engineer and computer scientist to advance the goals of four start-up companies. His main passion is with enterprise clients, identifying potential problems and solving them with new business ideas. In his latest entrepreneurship adventure, he has created Quantum Metric to help enterprise companies better understand their clients and adjust their offerings to maximum client retention. As people depend more and more on technology to fulfill their shopping needs, it's vital for companies to gauge consumer interactions with technology. It's equally important that this data be easily read and interpreted by businesses so the proper steps can be taken to optimize customer experiences, and Quantum Metric is making this a reality.

We talk more about Mario's time at Quantum Metric and his appreciation for the great company culture they've created. He tells us about continuous product design and the importance of creating a business culture that empowers people to make decisions, allowing the company to change and grow quickly. By essentially taking the idea of DevOps and transposing it on the functions of a business, both the technology side and business side can run quickly and efficiently.

Later, Mario gives us great examples of customers using Quantum Metric and continuous product design to take their companies to the next level. Stephanie and Mario dig into the tech side of Quantum Metric and share which Google Cloud products they utilize.

Mario wraps up the show with a look ahead at the future of SaaS companies and offers some advice for other new businesses.

Episode Links:
Quantum Metric
Continuous Product Design
BigQuery

Mario wraps up the show with a look ahead at the future of SaaS companies and offers some advice for other new businesses.

Episode Links:
Quantum Metric
Continuous Product Design
BigQuery

Previous Episode

Superior Video Streaming with Wowza Media Systems CEO Dave Stubenvoll and Vice President of Engineering Ben Mesander

Welcome back to How I Launched This, A SaaS Story! This week, Stephanie (@stephr_wong) and Carter (@carterthecomic) are talking with two executives from Wowza Media Systems, a world leader in live streaming content. With both managed services and highly customizable components available as downloadable software or in the cloud, Wowza is capable of catering to any client.

CEO and Co-Founder, Dave Stubenvoll, starts the show with a history of Wowza and how a project called Blog Cheese got him started in streaming. VP of Engineering, Ben Mesander, relates his streaming origin stories, explaining that he's always been interested in mathematical software problems and was naturally drawn to video compression.

Because Wowza is streaming so much data, Ben explains that proper bandwidth and scaling are important to reduce latency, minimize stutters, and more. He describes the steps they took to create the architecture in place now and walks us through a typical stream on Wowza.

Our guests talk about real-world use cases for Wowza, from things like gaming to the life-saving monitoring of infants in ICU. With the company ideals of worldwide availability and open minds, Wowza is used by all different kinds of companies all across the globe. Ben and Dave talk about the future of Wowza, including specific offerings they hope to deploy. We have an interesting discussion about the role of AI in video streaming and how this will continue to develop.

Episode Links:
Wowza Media SystemsChild Health ImprintsMonitorFish

Next Episode

Elevating the Customer Experience with True Fit Co-founder and Chief Customer Officer Jessica Murphy

Stephanie (@stephr_wong) and Carter (@carterthecomic) are back this week with TrueFit Co-Founder and CCO, Jessica Murphy. TrueFit is revolutionizing online clothes shopping experience utilizing a data collective of size, fit preference, body shape, gender, brand preferences to precisely pinpoint the customer's true size. When retailers personalize every part of the journey, customers gain confidence in the seamless online shopping experience.

Co-Founder Jessica Murphy starts the show explaining a little more about how TrueFit came to be and how the program collects customer information and product information, analyzes the data, and brings the customer to the perfect fit in each particular brand. With this data, TrueFit goes a step further, offering style recommendations for your size and shape as well. Standardization between brands is a benefit of the program, helping customers find similar products across brands.

We talk a bit about data security and why building trust with companies and shoppers was so important to the growth of TrueFit. Jessica describes how her lack of technological experience at the beginning was no hindrance, explaining that a lot of the logic behind the algorithms now used was developed by her early on. Jessica and her Co-Founder, Romney Evans, learned software as they went, hiring friends and developers along the way.

As the company migrated to Google Cloud, important decisions had to be made, and Jessica tells us about this journey. She describes challenges they faced, including the rapid growth they've seen since the start of the global pandemic.

A first-generation Colombian in America, Jessica reflects on how family and cultural traditions shaped her as an entrepreneur. We touch on diversity in SaaS companies and why it can be a crucial component of a successful business and is vital to a successful AI model.

To wrap up the show, Jessica gives us her thoughts on the future of data, AI, and internet companies and offers some great advice for aspiring entrepreneurs.

Episode Links:TrueFit

How I Launched This: A SaaS Story - Understanding Consumer Behavior with Quantum Metric CEO Mario Ciabarra

Transcript

Mario Ciabarra [00:00:06] You can't succeed in a SaaS business without having an absolute focus of the customer. And if you think about, really, the big winners over the last couple decades in technology, they are hyper customer focused, and I think that trend will continue.

Stephanie Wong [00:00:19] Welcome back, everyone, to "How I Launched This: A SaaS Story" from Google Cloud, a podcast about the CXOs and founders of SaaS companies and some of the mo