 Hello everyone, welcome to theCUBE's presentation of the AWS Startup Showcase, Martek Emerging Cloud Scale, customer experience. This is season two, episode three of the ongoing series covering the exciting startups from the AWS ecosystem, talking about the data analytics, all the news and all the hot stories. I'm John Furrier, your host of theCUBE. And today we're excited to be joined by Rachel Opsler, VP of product at heap, heap.io. Here to talk about from what to why the future of digital insights, great to see you. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks for having me, John. Thanks for having me back. Well, we had a great conversation prior to the event here, a lot going on. You guys had acquired Aurek in an acquisition. You kind of teased that out last time. Talk about this, the news here and why is it important? And first give a little setup on heap and then the acquisition with Aurek. Yeah, so heap is a digital insights platform. So as you mentioned, it's all about analytics. And so heap really excels at helping you understand what your users and customers are doing in your digital application at scale. So when it comes to Aurek, what we really saw was a broken workflow. Maybe I would even call it a broken market where a lot of customers had an analytics tool like heap. So using heap on one hand to figure out what is happening at scale with their users. But on the other hand, they were also using like a session replay tool separately to look at individual sessions and see exactly what was happening. And no one was very effective at using these tools together. They didn't connect at all. And so as a result, neither one of them could really be fully leveraged. And so with this acquisition, we're able to put these two tools together so that users can both understand the what at scale and then really see the why immediately together in one place. You know, I love that word why because there's always that famous motivational video on the internet. You got to know your why. You know, it's very a motivational thing. But now you're getting more practicality. What and why is the lens you want, right? So I totally see that. And again, you tease that out in our last interview we did. But I want to understand what's under the covers under the acquisition. What was the big thesis behind it? Why the joint forces? What does this all mean? Why is this so important to understand this new what and why and the acquisition specifically? Yeah, so let me give you example of a couple of use cases that's really helpful for understanding this. So imagine that you are a product manager or maybe a growth marketer, but you're someone who owns a digital experience. And what you're trying to do, of course, is make that digital experience amazing for your users so that they get value. And that may mean that they're using it more. It may mean that new features are easily discoverable, that you can upsell things on your own. There's all sorts of different things that that may mean. But it's all about making it easy to use, discoverable, understandable, and as self-service as possible too. And so most of these digital builders, so we call them digital builders sometimes, they are trying to figure out when the application is not working the way that it should be working, where people are getting stuck, where they're not getting the value and figure how to fix that. And so one really great use case is I just want to understand in mass, like let's say you have a flow, where are people dropping off, right? So I see that I have a four step funnel and between the step three and four people are dropping off. Heap is great for getting very detailed on exactly what action they're taking where they're dropping off. But then the second you find what that action is, quantitatively, you want to watch it. You want to see what they did exactly before it, you want to see what they did after it, you want to understand why they're getting stuck, what they're confused at, are they mousing over two things? Like you kind of want to watch their session. And so what this acquisition allows us to do is to put those things together seamlessly. You find the point in friction, you watch a bunch of examples, very easily. In the past, this would take you at least hours if you could do it at all. And then another use case is the other direction. So there's the kind of, I think of it as the max to the min, and then there's the other direction as well, like you have the, or maybe it's the macro to micro, you have the micro to macro, which is you have one user that had a problem and maybe they send in a support ticket. Well, you can validate the problem, you can watch it in the session, but then you want to know, did this only happen to them? Did this happen to a lot of users? And this is really worth fixing because all these customers are having the same problem. That's the micro to macro flow that you can do as well. Yeah, and that's like the quantitative, qualitative of the what and the why. I totally see the value there and I like the way you explain that. Good call out. The question I have for you is a lot of people have these tools. I got someone who does that. I got someone over here that does the quantitative. I don't need to have one company do it, or do I? So the question I have for you, what does having a single partner or vendor providing both the quantitative and the qualitative nails mean for your customers? So it's all because now it's immediate. So today with the two tools being separate, you may find something quantitatively, but then to find the sessions that you want to watch that are relevant to that quantitative data point, it's very difficult at least it takes hours to do so. And a lot of times people just give up and they don't bother. The other way is also true. You can watch sessions. You can watch as many sessions as you want. You can spend hours doing it. You may never find anything of interest, right? So it just ends up being something that users don't do. And actually we've interviewed a lot of customers. They have a lot of guilt about this. A lot of product managers feel like they should be spending all this time, but they just don't have the time to spend. And so it not only brings them together, but it brings them together with immediacy. So you can immediately find the issue, find exactly where it is and watch it. And this is a big deal because if you think about, I guess like today's economic conditions, you don't have a lot of money to waste. You don't have a lot of time to waste. You have to be very impactful with what you're doing and with your spending of development resources. Yeah, and totally. And I think one of the things that's immediacy is key because it allows you to connect dots faster. And we have the aha moments all the time. If you miss that, the consequences can be quantified in a bad product experience and lost customers. So you totally see that. Zooming out now, I want to get your thoughts on this because we're going down this road of essentially every company is digital now, right? So digitization, digital transformation. What do you want to call it? Data is digital. This video is an experience. It's also data as well. You're talking, we're going to share this and people are going to experience that. So every website that's kind of old school is now becoming essentially a digital native application or e-commerce platform. All the things that were once preserved for the big guys, the hyperscalers in the categories, the big budgets now are coming down to every company. Every company is a digital company. What challenges do they have to transition from, I got a website, I got a marketing team. Now I've got to look like a world-class product, e-commerce, multifaceted application with developers, with change, with agility. Well, so I think that last thing you said is a really important part of it, the agility. So these products, when you're going from just a website to a product, they're a lot more complex, right? And so maybe I can give an example. We have a customer, it's an insurance company. So they have this online workflow. And if you can imagine signing up for insurance online, it's a pretty long, complicated workflow. I mean, hey, better to do it online than to have to call someone and wait on the phone. And so it's a good experience, but it's still fraught with opportunities of people getting stuck and never coming back. And so one of the things that HEP allowed this customer to do was figure out something that wasn't working in the workflow. And so if you think about traditional analytics tools, typically what you're doing is you're writing tracking code and you're saying, hey, I'm gonna track this funnel, this process. And so maybe it has five different forms or pages that you have to go through. And so what you're doing when you track it is you say, did you submit the first one? Did you submit the second one? Did you submit the third one? So you know where they're falling off. Where they're falling off, but you don't know why. You don't know which thing got them stuck because each one of these pages has multiple inputs and it has maybe multiple steps that you need to do. And so you're completely blind to exactly what's happening. Well, it turned out because HEP collects all this data that on one of these pages where users were dropping off, it was because they were clicking on a fact. There was a link to a fact. And because it's a big company, the fact took them to a completely different application, didn't know how to get back from there and they just lost people. And imagine if you were doing this with traditional means today, right? You don't have any visibility into what's happening on that page. You just know that they fell off. You might think about, what do I do to fix this? How do I make this flow work better? And you might come up with a bunch of ideas. One of your ideas could be, let's break it into multiple pages. Maybe there's too much stuff on this page. One of your ideas may have been, let's try a fact. They're getting stuck, let's give them some more help. That would be a very bad idea, right? Because that was actually the reason why they were leaving and never coming back. So the point I'm making is that if you don't know exactly where people are getting stuck and you can't see exactly what is happening, then you're gonna make a lot of very bad decisions. You're gonna waste a lot of resources trying things that make no sense. It is hard enough as a digital builder and all the product managers and growth marketers and marketers out there can attest to this. It's hard enough when you know exactly what the problem is to figure out a good solution, right? That's still hard. But if you don't know the problem, it's impossible. Okay, so let's just level up. The bumper sticker now for the challenges are what? Decision making, what's the, stack ranked the top three challenges from that? So it's being agile, right? So being very fast because you're competing with a lot of companies right now. It's about making really good decisions and driving impact, right? So you have to have all the data that you need. You have to have the specific information about what's going on. Because if you don't have it, you're going to decide to invest in things and you're not going to drive the impact that you want. So now you got the acquisition of Orca and Orric and you have this visibility and the customers that are building, investing, you mentioned. Okay, as they invest, whether it's the digital product or new technology and R&D, what feedback have you guys seen from these investments, from these customers? What results have come out of it? Could you share any specific answers to the problems and challenges you outlined? Because, you know, this growth hackers could be failing because of stupid little product mistakes that could have been avoided in the feedback. You know what I'm saying? So it's like, where can you, where are these challenges addressed? And what are some of the results? Yeah, so what we've seen with our customers is that when they are applying this data and doing this analysis on, say workflows or goals that they're trying to accomplish, they've been able to move the needle quite a bit. And so whether it is, you know, increasing conversion rates or whether it is making sure that they don't have, you know, drop off of trial signups or making sure that their customers are more engaged than before. When they know exactly where they're failing, it is much easier to make an investment and move the needle. Awesome. Well, let's move on to the next big topic, which I love is about data science and data engineering. You guys are a data company. And I want to ask you specifically how he uniquely is positioned to help companies succeed where in the old big tech world, they're tightening the ropes on secure cookies, privacy, data sharing. At the same time, there's been an explosion in cloud scale, data opportunities. And new technologies. So it seems like a new level of capability is going to replace the old cookies, privacy, data sharing, which seem to be constricting or going away. How do you, what's your reaction to that? Can you share how heat fits into this next generation and the current situation going on with the cookies and privacy stuff? Yep. So it is really important in this world to be collecting data compliantly, right? And so what that means is you don't want to be reliant on third party cookies. You want to be reliant on just first party information. You want to make sure that you don't collect any PII. Heap is built to do that from the ground up. We by default will not collect information like what do people put into forms, right? Because that's a obvious source of PII. The other thing is that there's just so much data. So you kind of alluded to this with this idea of data science. So first of all, you're collecting data compliantly. You're making sure that you have all the data of what your user actions are doing compliantly. But then it's so much data that it, like how do you know where to start, right? You want to know, you want to get to that specific point that users are dropping off, but there's so many different options out there. And so that's where heap is applying data science to automatically find those points of friction and automatically surface them to users so that you don't have to guess and check and constantly guess at what the problem is, but you can see it in the product surface right for you. You know, Rachel, that's a great point. I want to call that out because I think a lot of companies don't underestimate what you said earlier. Capturing in compliance way means you're opting in to say not to get the data to unwind it later, figure it out. You're capturing it in a compliant way which actually reduces the risk and operational technical debt you might have to deploy to get it fixed on compliance. Okay, that's one thing. I love that. I want to make sure people understand that value. That's a huge value, especially for people that don't have huge teams and diverse platforms or other data sources. The other thing you mentioned is owning their own data and that first party data is a strategic advantage mainly around personalization and targeted customer interaction. So the question is with the new data, I own the data, you got to capture it with compliance. How do you do personalization and targeted customer interactions at the same time while being compliant? It just seems like compliance is restrictive and kind of forecloses value, but open means you get a personalization and targeted interactions. How do you guys connect the dots there by being compliant but yet being valuable on the personalization and targeted? Well, it all depends on how the customer is managing their information, but imagine that you have a logged in user. Well, you know who the logged in user is, right? And so all we really need is an ID. We don't need to know any of the user information. We just need an ID. And then we can serve up the information about like what have they done? If they've done these three actions, maybe that means that this particular offer would be entrusted to them. And so that information is available within Heap for our customers to use it as they want to with their users. So you're saying you can enable companies to own their data, be compliant, and then manage it end to end from a privacy standpoint? Yes. That's got to be a top seller right there. Well, it's not just a top seller, it's a necessity. It's a must have. I mean, think about it. I mean, what are people who don't do this? What do they face? What's the alternative? You don't get the heap going immediately. What's the alternative? I'm going through logs. I got to have to get a request to forget my data. All these things are all going on, right? What's the consequence of not doing this? Well, there's a couple of consequences. So one is, and I kind of alluded to it earlier, that you're blind to what your users are doing, which means that you're making investments that may not make sense, right? So you can decide to add all the cool features in the world, but if the customers don't perceive them as being valuable or don't find them or don't understand them, it doesn't serve your business. And so this is one of the rule number one of being a product manager is you're trying to balance what your customers need with what is also good for your business, and both of those have to be in place. So that's basically where you are, is that you'll be making investments that just won't be hitting the mark and you won't be moving the needle, and as I mentioned, it's more important now in this economic climate than ever to make sure that the investments you're making are targeted and impactful. Yeah, and I think the other thing to point out is it's a big backlash against the whole Facebook, you're the product, you're getting used, the user's being used for product, but you guys have a way to make that happen in a way that's safe for the user. Yes, safe and compliant. So we're all about making sure that we certainly don't get our customers into trouble and we recommend that they follow all compliance rules because the last thing you want to be is on the wrong side of a compliance officer. Well, there's also the user satisfaction problem and the fines. So a lot going on there, great product. I got to ask you real quick before we kind of wrap up here, what's the reaction been to the acquisition of quantitative, qualitative? What's been the vibe? What are some, what are people saying about it? We've got a lot of interest. So I mentioned earlier that this is really a broken workflow in the market. And when users see the two products working together, they just love it because they have not been able to leverage them being separate before. And so it just makes it so much easier for these digital builders to figure out what do I invest in because they know exactly where people are having trouble. So it's been really great. We've had a lot of reach-outs already asking us how they can use it, try it, not quite available yet. So it's going to be available later this summer. But great response so far. Awesome. Well, I love the opportunity. I love the conversation. I have to ask you now, looking forward, what does the future look like for companies taking advantage of your platform and tool? What can they expect in terms of R&D, investments, area of moves you're making? You're the head of product, you get the keys to the kingdom. What's the future look like? What's coming next? Yeah, so other than pulling the call and the quant together, you actually hinted at it earlier when you're asking me about data science, but continuing to automate as much of the analysis as we can. So first of all, analysis, analytics, it should be easy for everyone. So we're continuing to invest in making it easy, but part of making it easy is, like we can automate analysis. We can see that your website has a login page on it and build a funnel for you automatically. So that's some of the stuff that we're working on is how do we both automate getting up to speed and getting that initial analysis done easily without any work? And then also, how do we automate more complex analyses? So you have typically, a lot of companies have a data science team and they end up doing a lot of analysis. It's a little bit more complex. I'm not saying data science teams will go away. They will be around forever. There's tons of very complex analysis that they're probably not even getting time to do. We're gonna start chipping away at that so we can help product managers do more and more of that self-service and then free up the data science team to do even more interesting things. I really like how you use the word product managers, product builders, digital builders, because while I got you, I want to get your thought on this because it's a real industry shift. You're talking about it directly here about websites going to e-commerce, CMOs, a C-suite, they generally observe that websites are old technology, but not going away because the next level abstraction builds on top of it. What's the new capabilities? Because for the CMOs and the C-suites and the product folks out there, they're not building web pages, they're building applications. What is it about this new world that's different from the old web architecture? How would you talk to a CMO or a leader and when they ask what's this new opportunity to take my website? Because maybe it's not enough traffic, people are consuming out in the organic. What's this new expectation and what does a new product manager environment look like if it's not the web, so to speak? Well, there's a couple of things. So one is, and you alluded to it a bit, like the websites are also getting more complex and you need to start thinking of your website as a product. Now, it may not be the product that you sell, but it is, well, for e-commerce, it's a place that you get access to the product. For B2B SaaS, it is the window to the product, it's a place where you can learn about the product and you need to think about not just like what pieces of content are being used, but you need to understand the user flow through the application. So that's how it's a lot more like a product. Rachel, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE here for this presentation. Final word, put a plug in for the company. What are you guys up to? What are you looking for? Take a minute to explain kind of that. What's going on? How do people contact you with a great value proposition? Put a plug in for the company. Yeah, well, if you want to up-level your product experience or website experience, you want to be able to drive impact quickly, try Heap. You can go to heap.io, you can try it for free. We have a free trial, we have a free product even. And yeah, and then if you have any questions you want to talk to a live person, you can do that too at sales at heap.io. Rachel, thanks so much. Customer scale, experiences with the cloud. Obviously, this is the season two, episode three of the ongoing series. I'm John Furrier, your host. Thanks for watching.