Jack Ryder’s streetwear obsession took off back in 2012 with the release of the Nike Air Foamposite One NRG Galaxy. At the same time, Instagram was making waves, and streetwear became easily discoverable. But as streetwear exploded globally, it became harder to shop for. Among Instagram accounts, Facebook groups, and subreddits – the space had gotten overcrowded, making it harder to find, buy, and sell.
In response to their own negative experiences, Jack Ryder and his cofounder, Sam Howarth, decided to build a marketplace dedicated to the buying and selling of streetwear. But this founding team fully understood the need to create a shopping experience that catered to Gen Z expectations. Jack and Sam certainly knew what they were doing – today, Bump has millions of users exploring, buying, and selling products on the platform.
Brooklyn Data Co. helped Bump go from ad hoc queries and limited visibility into their metrics to using data to validate and support the Bump team’s impressive product intuitions. Plus, with a robust analytics infrastructure setup, Bump could fully trust their numbers when they pitched to VCs. An investment in data that (so far) has turned out to be worth $7.5 million, the size of Bump’s Series A round.
Raising Series A with the help of reliable reporting
As Bump geared up for fundraising, Brooklyn Data helped them prepare. Brooklyn Data conducted an in-depth analysis in order to understand marketplace dynamics. Brooklyn Data was also there to support the many data requests from prospective investors.
Armed with new knowledge, Bump could confidently present performance metrics to potential investors that were understandable, coherent, and most of all accurate. Being able to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of their business, Bump impressed investors and successfully raised Series A funding. In fact, Bump’s journey from seed round to Series A was one of the fastest on record.
“Brooklyn Data Co. helped us not only quickly answer investor questions but go that extra mile. In particular, an investigation into the relationship between social activity on the marketplace and buy/sell behavior brought about insane insights that we had no choice but to place at the heart of our investor pitch.”
— JACK RYDER, CEO
Building a more data-informed culture with the right tools
Bump needed to understand the dynamics of their marketplace. At the time, Bump pulled ad hoc queries directly from a read replica of their production database. But that needed to change. They needed something reliable, scalable, and consistent to reference on a daily basis. And like most businesses, Bump needed to combine data from different sources–in their case MongoDB, Mixpanel, and PayPal.
For Bump’s business intelligence needs, Brooklyn Data selected Mode and built out a suite of visualization-driven reports. As a foundation for that reporting, Brooklyn Data used dbt to model the underlying data to represent the company’s business logic in a way that would be simple and reusable going forward.
The result? Bump’s data and reporting sit at their fingertips (including daily updates from Mode in Slack). The team can validate their assumptions and explore questions around user behavior as they continue to release new product features and polish the user experience.
With the core analytics infrastructure set up, the Bump team had a comprehensive platform that gave them visibility into product and user dynamics.
Raising Series A with the help of reliable reporting
As Bump geared up for fundraising, Brooklyn Data helped them prepare. Brooklyn Data conducted an in-depth analysis in order to understand marketplace dynamics. Brooklyn Data was also there to support the many data requests from prospective investors.
Armed with new knowledge, Bump could confidently present performance metrics to potential investors that were understandable, coherent, and most of all accurate. Being able to demonstrate a comprehensive understanding of their business, Bump impressed investors and successfully raised Series A funding. In fact, Bump’s journey from seed round to Series A was one of the fastest on record.
“Brooklyn Data Co. helped us not only quickly answer investor questions but go that extra mile. In particular, an investigation into the relationship between social activity on the marketplace and buy/sell behavior brought about insane insights that we had no choice but to place at the heart of our investor pitch.”
— JACK RYDER, CEO
Going from limited visibility to trusting the numbers
Bump was growing fast. But with that growth, the team needed to understand what was happening in both the product and the user base. Bump could see streetwear sales taking place on the platform, but the team had little visibility into the marketplace dynamics driving those transactions.
The more users came to the app, the more questions arose. Who were Bump’s users? How were they using the app? What percentage of users were selling and buying? What new product features would users find valuable?
Answering those questions was an important step towards understanding how to scale.
Because their app was built in house, Bump didn’t have out-of-the-box reporting. By no means was the team flying blind–they looked to Mixpanel and their production database, MongoDB, for data, but Mixpanel’s reporting isn’t geared toward marketplace needs, MongoDB is not particularly analytics-friendly, and there was no way to easily join the two.
Bump needed a tool that pulled in data across sources and provided them with customizable reporting they could trust.
Build data capabilities that last with Brooklyn Data Co
