Data startup Alpine says dog food is delicious. Here's how it uses its own tools

SAN FRANCISCO — Alpine Data Labs doesn’t just help companies crunch data and learn about operations. The startup’s marketers also use data to boost Alpine’s own prominence.

Changing a logo or a homepage based on a hunch — that’s not Alpine’s approach, believe it or not.

“All of that has to be kind of built on data,” Bruno Aziza, the chief marketing officer at Alpine Data Labs, told Matt Marshall, VentureBeat’s founder and chief executive, at VentureBeat’s DataBeat conference today. Such endeavors, Aziza said, ought to be boosted with analytics-on-steroids applications.

As a big data analytics startup, Alpine lets people collaboratively do statistical work on different kinds of data without writing code. Alpine even helps marketers like Aziza arrive at business goals, such as increasing web traffic.

For example, when Aziza joined Alpine from data analytics startup SiSense last year, about 100 people were interacting with Alpine’s application through its website. Now, that number is at 2,000, he said.

The data filters through a series of funnels of data tools: Google Analytics, Marketo, Segment.io, Salesforce.com, and Mixpanel. Ultimately, Aziza said, he can see what people do in Alpine.

“I know this starts to get Big Brother-ish,” he said. “We’re doing that for your benefit, in a way.”

Indeed, Airbnb, Anaplan, Mindjet, Pinterest, RelateIQ, and other software companies all watch people’s usage or harbor ambitions of doing so. Data monitoring is increasingly popular, and tools like Alpine can clearly come in handy for a wide range of companies, including Citigroup, GE, and Sony.

Alpine announced a $16 million round of venture funding in November. It has grown its revenue more than 200 percent in less than a year, and its web traffic is 15 times larger than it was at that time.

“I’m not buying Google AdWords or anything like that to drive that,” Aziza said.

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