It wasn’t that long ago that people couldn’t conceive of buying anything over the computer. Besides the limited technology, we mostly used cash instead of debit cards and were often gun shy about giving our credit card numbers to strangers.
Fast forward a couple of decades, and it’s tough to find someone who doesn’t shop online. (Even my mother made her first online purchase this past Christmas.) It’s estimated by some that online retail sales will reach $370 billion by 2017.
Obviously, with such a large and growing market, entrepreneurs are rushing to cash in. Online retail is increasingly viable and, even with logistics and inventory, is cheaper than opening a brick and mortar location.
In our data-driven world, the growth of a market also means the need for better and better analytics.
Fayetteville, AR-based MineWhat is poised to provide specialized eCommerce analytics for online retailers..
With a quick install, e-tailers can access a wide array of data that goes far beyond pageviews. MineWhat allows merchants to see what products shoppers look at, what brands sell well together, what products should be showcased, and a ton more data-junkie goodness.
Check out our interview with MineWhat CEO Janakiram Ganesan below.
1) What does your company do?
Think of MineWhat as a platform that enables online retailers to ask questions of their data and get answers to them as well. We help online stores pick the right merchandise whether it’s for marketing campaigns, product strategy, landing pages and more.
2) Who are the founders and what are their backgrounds?
MineWhat was founded by Pavan Kumar and Janakiram Ganesan.
Pavan spent some time writing code at various huge product firms before starting out as an entrepreneur. MineWhat is is his second startup venture. He likes scalability related problems, data management on the web and is an avid tech enthusiast.
MineWhat is my second startup as well. I’ve worked on machine learning related problems over the years. Of late I’ve been more interested in marketing, building businesses and tech evangelism
3) What’s the story behind your idea?
The initial idea behind MineWhat came out of the Indian eCommerce boom during 2010 – 2011.
eCommerce seemed like a really interesting thing to jump into. Friends of ours had started out building eCommerce stores of their own and we thought we’d rather do something that will help online stores instead of building another one.
4) How as being part of the ARK Challenge helpful for your startup?
The ARK Challenge really helped us refine the product idea. The mentors were awesome, getting to leverage their network and using their product feedback was of great help.
5) What milestones have you reached, and what are you working on next?
We’ve begun our sales push now, we are averaging over two signups a week. Most of what we will be focusing on from here on will be how to acquire and retain more customers.
6) Where can folks find out more?
They can head over to our website or onto any of our social media pages
https://minewhat.com
https://twitter.com/minewhat
https://www.facebook.com/minewhat?ref=hl