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Interview Series #1 episode 1: Sam Carter asks Jake Higgins about the major challenges organizations most commonly face and they can solve them.

The CEO of Fospha, Sam Carter, asks Jake Higgins, the co-founder of Growth club about the major challenges organizations most commonly face and they can solve them.

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Sam Carter and Jake Higgins: Interview Series #1 episode 1

Sam Carter, CEO of Fospha, asked Jake Higgins, a founding partner of the Growth Club about the major challenges organizations most commonly face and they can solve them.

Sam: The idea of this series is to try and sort of over the course of a series of interviews, collect sort of consistent themes and trends like the really big burning topics, challenges and solutions that people in the space have. And so we're delighted that you're here. And the thing will be themed around four big questions, so I'll get straight into it.

Question number one is the types of organizations that you've worked with in current role and in previous roles, what are the kind of the big consistent challenges that you've seen that they have had and how has the organization and you gone about solving them?

Jake: Yeah, big question.

Sam: Sorry. It's a massive one to start with.

Jake: So yeah, in terms of challenges, I think a lot of people might have an initial product market fit, whether that's an app, whether it's DTC, consumer, whatever it might be. But then as they scale, that initial kind of customer economic situation doesn't scale with their spend. And I think that's the perennial problem that startups face. How do you handle that journey from early adopters to late adopters?

And for me, there is probably too much emphasis on often the marketing itself or the channels or what have you. And I think really most of the big gnarly problems that I've seen organizations come up against have really been solved by not just the great quantitative data that companies like Fospha can provide, but the qualitative data. I really think people who spend more time doing non-biased user testing, non-biased customer interviews, will really start to understand the problems and the real talk around their product. And the ideal scenario is that you hunt for all the bad news because if you can take the feedback from a prospect or someone who abandoned cart or someone who's never heard of you, you can take that negative feedback, be it on the product or the marketing, make those changes. It's like a law of gravity, right? It's like nature conversion rate will go up. So I think some of the biggest challenges around how does that initial product market fit scale and how do we understand the different customers in different demographics and how do they think about our marketing and think about our product? And one of the best solutions I've seen to that is doing very systematic customer development. I'm a big advocate of the book The MumTest, spelled in the American sense, Mo M. It's a quick primer, you can read it on a train ride, but it teaches you how to ask non-biased customer interviews.

And I think people should do that more. What I notice is that it doesn't float to the top of the to-do list, even for some of the best companies out there. And look, we've been there. You get to your desk and you have a to-do list that's probably too long speaking to strangers about why your product and marketing is terrible. It doesn't often float to the top. And so you have to be really disciplined to take the time to do that. But it is worth.

Sam: It got to be prepared for hearing things that you don't really want to hear.

Jake: That's the ideal scenario. And if you just speak to your current customers, it can become an echo chamber. And sometimes that happens, right? People have product market fit with an early adopter audience. The echo chamber gases them up, as it were, and then they raise on a big valuation.

And then when it comes to deploying that capital, they find that actually how that product market fit scales through those lateral adopters is not the same as it was in the outset, which is why it's so important to have great quantitative tools like Fospha and so on, and also great qualitative data. It's those two things because those two things combined can give you real intellectual honesty about the situation you're in. And a lot of the time you work with organizations or you see organizations that don't have the intellectual honesty, they don't know their current situation. If you don't know your current situation, how can you pull the different levers that are going to drive growth?

So I think we were chatting earlier about some of the things that I look at when I start working with an organization, but that's the starting board. What tools and systems do they have in place? What data, both quantum qual to understand their situation? I think that the first thing I would be looking at.

FAQs

Can I try Fospha for free?

At Fospha, we're so confident in the value of our solution that we offer everyone the chance to try the platform at absolutely no risk. That means that if you're not happy for any reason in the first month of working together we'll give you a full refund - no questions asked.
 
How are we able to be so confident? It's simple: we know from years of working with the best eCommerce brands in the world that we offer the best & fastest onboarding in the industry. That means that the average customer gets live dashboards within just one week. We also know that our modelling is the best in the market, so we're confident that once you get into the platform and see how well Meta and TikTok are really working, you won't want to turn it off.

Aren't attribution tools difficult to set up?

Traditionally, yes! That's one of the reasons we built Fospha - so that brands without the time or budget to take on Enterprise-level data projects could still have access to gold standard measurement.
 
Fospha is quick and easy to go live, and in most cases doesn't even require input from your tech team!

Do I need technical support to go live with Fospha?

Fospha is designed to make set up and integration quick and easy.
 
Especially if you're using out of the box platforms like Shopify, Magento or WooCommerce, the only setup that is required is granting Fospha access to your systems so we can pull the data we need to run our models. For most people this takes 15 minutes of non-technical setup time.
 
Even if you're using a custom setup or headless eCommerce system, we make it quick and easy to get started - you will just need to schedule a daily report from your backend system to be delivered via S3.
 
All the rest of the magic happens on the back end - Fospha automatically cleans, reconciles and models your data to present a single, simple view of performance that you can trust.

How do I know your model is accurate?

Fospha's model incorporates a rigorous QA process every day, selecting a best-fit set of model parameters for each client and then precisely testing them until it produces an outcome which exceeds our high accuracy threshold.
 
We also have QA checks to make sure that the data we are being passed from your systems is flowing smoothly, and alert customers in case a change you've made has caused an issue with your Google Analytics or Ads Manager setup.
 
Lastly, there is a human layer to our QA - by surfacing multiple attribution models in the dashboards, we can make sure that the data our model produces passes an eye test.

Which channels does Fospha measure?

Put simply: if it's digital, we measure it.
 
We integrate visit and conversion data from all your sources as standard, and add it to our model. We think this is essential - if your attribution platform will only integrate some of your digital marketing data, it only has a partial view of performance.
 
That means we measure your click-based channels like Paid Search, Shopping, Pmax and Affiliate. It also means we measure channels that deliver their value through impressions, like Meta, TikTok, Pinterest and Youtube.

How long does it take to go live?

Fospha is super easy to get live - the average customer spends just 15 minutes setting the platform up. That time goes on getting Fospha the Account and API access we need to connect to your key systems to our platform.
 
Once that is done, the Fospha team get busy getting your data cleaned and integrated into the platform, and running our modelling. That process takes about a week on average, so it's not long from when you sign up to when you can first start using the platform.
 
Fospha remodel 12 months of historic data for our clients too, so you can immediately see how your spend has really been performing - no need to wait while the platform gathers data!

How long does it take to start getting value from Fospha?

The average Fospha customer is using live dashboards within a week of signing up.
 
When you get your dashboards, our team will highlight the things we think you should be doing differently this month using Fospha's modelling of your last 12 months' data. From here, all you need to do pick one thing to do differently that month - we know from experience that customers who do this every month find it easy to justify the investment in the platform.
 
Of course, in the first 6 months of working together most of our customers go far beyond this, using Fospha to power their strategy, internal reporting and all their tactical optimizations too. But that's just upside. For us, it comes back to deciding to do just one thing differently in your first month of using Fospha.

Is Fospha privacy safe?

Absolutely - Fospha is built privacy-first, and doesn't rely on invasive user-level tracking to feed our models. That's why our impressions measurement wasn't affected by iOS 14, and it's why brands using Fospha will always have the edge on those that rely on pixels to track their customers.

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