Cojoin | Data Integration
Businesses deal with countless data points, leading to decisions affecting their companies in various ways. Collecting and analyzing the right data can easily find faults and successes lying within the company’s walls. Cojoin offers business intelligence software to collect and analyze data easily and quickly. Instead of having multiple departments to handle this function, Cojoin expects companies to easily get rid of communication problems with their business intelligence software.
Matt Weghorst got in touch with TechZulu to explain the idea of Cojoin, LA, and the advantages of business intelligence software.
TechZulu: First thing first, why don’t you give us a brief overview of what Cojoin is?
Matt Weghorst: Cojoin is a data integration platform. Our mission is to gain efficiency through integration. We find that there’s all this really specialized software, software as a service, certain platforms, and different places you can do marketing; all of those have their own sets of data. But you can get to this new level of understanding when you integrate that data back together and that’s what Cojoin is all about.
Is it only a web-platform or will there be a mobile-version?
MW: Our dashboard interface, which is the end result of the analysis, is accessible across all devices. That’s really important, I was in a situation where I was running about a half-million dollars a month on AdWords and certainly the first thing I did every morning was look at my phone and see what the numbers were from the previous day and how it came to be today. So mobile is a huge part of it.
You aren’t going to make a mobile-centric app right now?
MW: The process of configuring reports is much more suited for laptop/desktop situation. But that end result, what it is your monitoring and watching, is incredibly important that it works across all devices. Tablet and mobile are a huge part of that. We will be releasing actual mobile apps down the road, but right now we have device-friendly HTML 5 web applications.
Speaking of Cojoin, the name caught me off guard thinking it was a co-working space, but it was really about analytics. Tell us how you got the name?
MW: It’s a geeky reference to a type of SQL statement where you’re doing a “left join”. That concept of connecting information together was something that was really important to me and I wanted to communicate in the name. Cojoin is sort of this ambiguous word – kind of mean something, kind of doesn’t mean something. The domain was available and I went and got it and the rest is history.
Where did the idea come about in the first place?
MW: At my previous company, I was running big online advertising campaigns and delivering – in this case – leads to clients. We worked with an enterprise web analytics application that was very, very expensive and very, very complicated. That required lots of developers to integrate it and work with it. But the end result was incredibly valuable, so looked at that end result and we were able to optimize our campaigns and be more efficient than our competition.
But the pain that we went through to get to that point was so much that companies, especially without the technical expertise like we had, couldn’t get there. Yet, I couldn’t duplicate what I had very easily, so I went back to the drawing board and came up with a new design and Cojoin is that new design.
Speaking of the difficulties of retrieving analytical data before Cojoin; why was it so difficult retrieving data?
MW: It has to do with the difference between a marketer and a developer. The marketers know all the right questions to ask, but the developers are the ones who actually have the ability to get the answer. The miscommunication is really common between those two groups of folks and the technical hurdles to get that answer is sometimes too great to get that response.
We really wanted to really remove the burden of the developers to get analytic data and query to answer those questions that a marketer would want to know. So the developers can focus on the product they are building and the app they are building and not worrying about anything all the details of how to track and how to connect it with other services.
You’re trying to be the middle-man between the marketers and developers?
MW: We like to think ourselves as a layer above all the other services that you may use that have a report. If its got a reporting interface, we are interested in ‘Cojoining’ it.
What other problems were you looking to solve with Cojoin?
MW: There are two different ones. There’s aggregation, so like in the entertainment industry, audience measurement is huge. Now we have TV anywhere and all these different ways to consume a television program, but there’s five or six different data services you might actually have to connect to get that overall big picture. That portion we call data aggregation where you are looking at one metric across a lot of different data sources.
The second problem is an attribution problem. We want to be able to track what a particular campaign or what a particular marketing process might go through when it’s multiple steps. A really good example is a product that is sold offline, where the marketing is done online. Let’s say you are looking for a dentist or a doctor or you’re doing a loan application. Most likely, you’re not actually going to complete the entire process online, but you may have done your initial research online. So what we really set to do is ‘Cojoin’ that offline data with the online data as well.
What were your hardest moments?
MW: I have to say the hardest things are how many hats you have to wear as a founder. I am a developer and technical founder, but in many cases it was best for me and my team for me not to be coding anything. Really sort of giving up on some of the parts I really love to do, in order to do more broader founder type responsibilities that I take on. I say that’s a big part of it. The other is messaging. With big data and all these big craze big data has come out there. Being able to explain what it is, what are mission is, how we differentiate from other technical startups, and also doing it in Los Angeles when I’m going up to San Francisco fairly often and certainly a lot of technical big data startups out there. To be the guy coming from out of town and showing what we are doing is often a challenge.
What about the good times?
MW: The good times have to be putting the team together. I mean, that’s been one of the most amazing things is when you closed a round of funding. You have the ability to do some recruiting. You can go out and find the absolute best people for the team. I pride myself at putting an amazing team and I’m really, really proud of the group we have.
What do you think about LA as a startup area?
MW: We love the customers in LA. That’s the first thing. There are so many opportunities to be a little bit more hands on, to work with some companies that are local, and there is a great opportunity in LA for that. Plus, San Diego and all of Southern California there’s a lot of opportunities in the marketing space, so we really like that as well. Plus, sunshine. There’s an opportunity for us and other companies in Southern California to say to the students up at Berkeley or Stanford, come have your internship at the beach. If you like it, come back next year or so and I think we got a recruiting advantage we can push a little bit harder when it comes to bringing in some of the best technical talent down here.
What do you think the tech scene in LA will look like in the future?
MW: Well I think, as others have said, a couple big successes. We need an IPO and we some real international/national press pointed on the technology scene in Southern California. But I think a lot of it is going to grow organically too. We’re starting to see Cross Campus and other co-working spaces. We’re really creating a community. Not just with the technical founders and the technical aspects of the industry that we are in, but also all of those contributors when it comes to understanding industry. The connection to entertainment industry is a huge advantage we should take advantage of and really there’s so much we can do here and it’s got that feeling you know? It’s just exciting to be here and even three years ago it wasn’t like that.
What other problems is the LA tech scene looking at?
MW: Problems that you always have technology in general or tech entrepreneurship in general is a very broad category. For me to have a B2B product and then pitch to a VC who’s been hearing B2C products or mobile app products over the last week, there’s a level of understanding and education that’s going to need to happen and I think it’s going to happen with time. It’s not really any problem, we’re a pretty new environment and we need to give it a little time.
What’s your take on the mobile ecosystem in the future?
MW: It’s interesting. We’re starting to see Google Glass and other interactive personal devices. I think that’s where we are headed. We’re in a sensor-driven world and I believe in a sensor-driven world where it’s not just you choosing to interact with the device, the device understands that you’re available to interact with and it’s more natural communication that’s going to happen that way. So, I’m incredibly interested in both the mobile world and also the physical world through sensors being able to do more measurement and understand things like parking meters and retail shopping experiences. There’s a lot that we can learn from data-driven decision making and I think mobile is going to be a huge part of that.
Is the amount of information we receive affecting the tech industry?
MW: I think we’re starting to see fewer and fewer total trends like where it’s the hottest kid on the block, so everyone flocks to it. Really with Twitter and Facebook, established as they arein being these hubs for content, I think the only thing we are going to see is that we’re going to have a better ability to filter through the content that you really care about. The mess and noise becomes something that you don’t have to sift through yourself. You can find what kind of content that you’re looking for really quickly.
Can you give any advice about the startup life?
MW: I think there is sort of this idea that if you just put together a good pitch and maybe a total prototype like screenshots and things like that. All of a sudden somebody is going to cut you a check and you’re going to get funded. The reality is that it’s a lot easier and a lot better for your business if you start out building a business at the scale that you are and then grow from there. I highly recommend putting together a business plan that allows you to be cash flow positive and stable and then go after that big disruptive change you wanted to.
I see Cojoin is in the enterprise-side of business, but what about the individuals or smaller businesses?
MW: Our latest numbers show there are 460 million people worldwide using spreadsheets at work. That’s a pretty big market. We’re really interested in having that person – that’s the analyst – who has been stuck with so much manual work that they are not able to create an automated system. What you end up is seeing people come up with this really great report, but it becomes their responsibility to maintain, update, and send it out.
What we want is to eliminate all that maintenance and updating. So, they’re not really stuck with all this manual work over and over.
There’s this application out there that are incredibly powerful, but it really takes some time to learn it. So, because of that, you need a platform that allows you to get the most important information out of that specific software like a Google Analytics, in order to share it throughout the organization. We feel like there’s a level of communication that can occur through data. You can communicate through reports and data just like you would communicate through instant message or SMS.
How hard was it to put Cojoin out in the market?
MW: The biggest problem we faced was – I had a very specific case in mind from my previous company – we really wanted to duplicate all the successes we had there, but do it in a much more innovative approach. However, when you go to build the technology, you start to find that ‘Oh, you can use it for this. Or we can use it for something else. We could use it for research in this area. We can use it for manufacturing.’ To prevent being distracted and to find focus to where you have a differentiating message on one specific point is really hard. Which is why the category that we’re in is called Business Intelligence, but it’s such a broad category that we want to focus on purely data-integration and that’s our differentiator is that we’re a business intelligence platform that focuses purely on data integration.
What are your next goals?
MW: We’re right now at that crucial spot where we’re onboarding our first customers. I’m incredibly excited on working hands on with our first pilot customers in order to both find those great used cases and stories we can start publishing. But also, the value that we are providing is going to become incredibly apparent really soon. I’m very excited about that.
Thank you Matt for your time.
