TAIPEI (Taiwan News) — Tresl is a startup helping businesses use AI to solve problems with data.
The company uses data derived from the online shopping platform Shopify to help sellers send emails to their customers at the right time with the right information. Speaking to the Startup Taiwan Podcast, the company’s co-founder and CEO John Chao (趙中廷) said that before Tresl some services existed targeting this market, but none of them were able to solve one key problem.
“How do you know as a merchant when to send these emails or who to send them to?,” Chao asked. “How do you actually create different personalized segmentation within your data?”
The first step was to create a model for breaking down different sellers’ markets according to three categories: Frequency of purchases, monetary spend, and when the last purchase was made.
“The person who spends the most, buys the most recent, and buys a lot, that is going to be your VIP,” Chao said.
“But somebody who buys very little, buys infrequently and has very few orders, those are going to be a low value customer.” He said understanding customers and markets in this way allows businesses to target customers more clearly and with greater effect.
Listen to the whole conversation here.
Chao said data scientists provide huge value for companies big and small. “When a marketer says, ‘Hey, I want better data,’ they're lying to you,” he said.
What businesses really want is a path to understanding the data, and the results that they can use to improve their businesses, Chao said. “They don’t have to analyze it for themselves,” he said.
Many big data vendors mostly target large businesses, Chao said, because those are the operators who have the budget to pay for their services. He said that now, the market has changed, and individuals also have a large amount of data that can be used to improve business performance.
Shopify could be a leading example, Chao said, as the millions of merchants that use the site have their data stored on a cloud platform that they do not use or analyse. “They don't even know that it's possible, so there's just a huge potential untapped market here,” he said.
Chao said the service they have created integrates intelligent technology in the same way as a high-performance electric car. “We want people's hands on the wheels, but it's going to help you make a bunch of decisions, just like how Tesla is doing,” he said.
