The global, unconventional venture fund TheVentureCity has today launched a free tool to measure the healthy growth of any startup: Growth Scanner. The custom analysis gives startups invaluable insight into the true health of their product, through the lens of the VC organization’s experienced team of data scientists and investors. Built by founders, for founders, TheVentureCity’s own data team crunches startups’ numbers to break down the crucial metrics needed to scale long-term.
Startups taking advantage of Growth Scanner first upload at least 6 months of data relating to users’ historical actions on their product to the platform. Those numbers are then transformed into a comprehensive, custom analysis of key metrics, benchmarks, strengths and weaknesses – all in a sharable, canvas-style dashboard with numbers and charts to help you visually tell your story to investors and stakeholders. That’s not all: every startup gets at least a 30-minute call in which TheVentureCity’s data experts will provide context and answer any questions. Also unlike similar products on the market, TheVentureCity’s Growth Scanner does not require startups to instrument their data, simply using the historical data they have already captured. The data is not shared with third parties.
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“Most young startups do not have a data science team, nor much support when deciding how to get the most out of their data,” says Laura González-Estéfani, Founder and CEO of TheVentureCity. “They might only focus on revenue and number of users at investor meetings, which can be exaggerated or bought, while ignoring statistics on user engagement and retention – which are the true signals that reveal the potential for hyper growth.”
Growth Scanner focuses on key metrics like retention/churn, engagement, and growth accounting, using tactics derived from the original Facebook growth team. TheVentureCity uses this data to assess the strength of a startup’s product-market fit, and give founders a better understanding of their product growth levers and benchmark within their industry so they can reach smart business decisions. They are also the statistics investors are most interested in hearing about.
“Growth Scanner has been critical to our understanding of our business in three ways,” says Álvaro Echevarría, Founder & CEO of SimpliRoute, whose Series A was led by TheVentureCity. “First, it clarified our unit economics and which segment we needed to invest in to grow. Second, it showed our revenue across different geographies to help us determine where we could reach the next level. Third, it’s helping us become Series B ready with critical advice on how to develop our data warehouse.”
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After building products in the early days of Facebook, WhatsApp and eBay, TheVentureCity’s international team came together to seek out high-potential startups regardless of zip code or time zone. Five years and over 100 investments later, these VCs know that to scale sustainably, startups must harness data instrumentation and analysis. As it analyzed countless startups’ transactional and usage data logs, TheVentureCity put together their own extensive data stack to train its data analytics technology.
Among TheVentureCity’s core beliefs is that VCs should not only give capital away but wisdom, and they decided to do so by democratizing data-driven advice for founders, regardless of whether or not they were in their portfolio. That is why it opened up its analytics technology up to all startups in the form of Growth Scanner. While this is a novel launch for the VC industry, it is just another step in TheVentureCity’s dedication to driving a more sustainable, data-driven approach among startups.