Listen to the full episode on  Unscripted SaaS

In this episode of Unscripted SaaS, host Jeremy Rivera sits down with Angshuman Rudra, a Product Manager at TapClicks with nine years of experience at the company. Angshuman discusses TapClicks' position as a marketing operations platform focused on agencies and media companies, and dives deep into their latest product development - a data pipeline solution called TapDataMax that connects marketing data with cloud data warehouses. This conversation explores the product development cycle, market positioning, and the evolving landscape of data movement in the SaaS industry.

Background and TapClicks' Position in the Market

Angshuman started by introducing his background and TapClicks' core function:

"I have been working at TapClicks for nine years in various roles... primarily on product and have been involved with a lot of products that we have built over the years. Typically what TapClicks does is it's a marketing operations platform for marketeers and focused on agencies and media companies. We have some of the largest agencies and media companies as our clients."

He further explained his own background:

"Before joining TapClicks, I actually was an engineer, mostly a data engineer and a backend engineer. I worked at Adobe and Yahoo and a few startups. And that's where my interest in data has always been there."

The New Product: ETL/ELT Data Pipelines

The conversation quickly moved to TapClicks' new product development - a data pipeline solution:

"What I'm excited about right now is one of the products that we have with TapClicks that we are launching. We launched it already as a soft launch a year ago. It's building ETL ELT pipelines to TapClicks. So I would love to talk more about it, but it's more about a data pipe."

Jeremy asked Angshuman to break down the ETL acronym and explain what the product aims to do:

"Tapclicks, the base of the Tapclicks platform is some awesome connectors or integrations that we have built across 400 or I think it's about 1,000 connectors, right? So the one world that we are living in, Jeremy, is omnichannel, right? Like everybody's advertising and playing in different channels."

Angshuman explained the components of ETL/ELT:

"In data engineering terms, that's called the extraction, right? So the E of the ETL is like putting all that data across all the platforms and then have some light modeling or light normalization across those categories."

"What TaPLix does and has always done is have really robust E and a really robust T. So we do allow people to connect those data together. And that's a T part of it. can blend transformation."

The new development focuses on the "L" - Load:

"What we have done recently, like maybe like last two years, we have been working on pushing that data out to third party destinations. So it's really about other people sort of downstream utilizing this data that we always had within the tactless ecosystem to go to, let's say a cloud data warehouse or a database."

Finding Product-Market Fit

Angshuman shared insights about how they identified the market opportunity:

"The product market fit that we found, right? So I love this book, Pattern Breakers, right? It's a recent book around startups. And one thing that they say is, look for an inflection point. And the inflection point for us, Jeremy, has been the adoption of cloud data warehouses."

He noted how the market has evolved:

"Five years ago, it was really big organizations that was only going for AWS and BigQuery, right? Now, it's actually even the low tech companies or slightly smaller companies, are moving into, let's have an AWS S3. So we are getting into that inflection point."

The demand came directly from customers:

"It actually came from customers right like I want to push the data out and we have like enough people who wanted this."

Understanding Customer Use Cases

A critical part of the product development was understanding how customers would use the data:

"What we're trying to do is really understand what do these users do once the data ends up in a data warehouse. So the second problem, I call it downstream processing."

Angshuman outlined several specific use cases:

"In some scenarios, they wanted to build more complex data models, right? Like let's say multi-touch attribution. Often that's, let's say they want to join that data with their finance data. They want to join the data with their operations data, product data, right?"

Some customers don't need the TapClicks dashboard but still want the data connection:

"Sometimes customers don't need our dashboard, right? Like maybe they already have their own internal dashboards or they're using a third party BI tool... And so what if we have that full path of, hey, you connect the data, E, you do some transformation and you load up your database."

Jeremy offered up an exampleof how that might work from his own experience, he worked with another SEO, Matt Brooks of SEOteric, where they’d discussed how a pizza franchise company like Your Pie, might want to be able to get marketing data from franchisees, as well as the parent franchise site. 

That also might be a process that goes “upstream and downstream” where the franchise might need to gather data from different sources first, then send it up to be used in the parent company’s marketing dashboard.

Product Management Challenges

Jeremy asked about the challenges in getting buy-in for the product. Angshuman shared:

"As product managers, we are always working through priorities, right? Like there are hundred different things to do. How do we prioritize this? Like what's the revenue potential? Is there a large enough market? I think that that's the biggest problem."

He offered advice to other product managers:

"And that's my suggestion to any product manager is like figuring that out. There are always cool ideas. There are always cool markets. Does it make sense for you? Does it make sense for your organization overall?"

The timing had to be right:

"It did not make sense like six years ago, right? It started to make sense as more and more customers started to move to cloud data warehouses."

Angshuman provided a framework for evaluation:

"Is there a large enough market? Is it right for us? And does it sort of align with the overall company vision? Like those are the three main things. And as long as you can prove those three things..."

The Importance of Sales Feedback

One of the key insights was about the importance of maintaining a close relationship with the sales team:

"I think there were two signals that really stuck with me, right? So one was actually sales, right? So sales always is like at the forefront, right? And that's my feedback is always at the product manager, stay in touch with clients, stay in touch with the sales team."

He recalled how the request evolved:

"This request kept coming up. This is like six years ago, Jeremy, six years ago. And there were like some customers who started to ask for it, right? Like, hey, this so-and-so is doing it, can you do it?"

Market Terminology Evolution

Jeremy inquired about how they navigate the evolving terminology in the data space. Angshuman admitted:

"I will not lie to you Jeremy, like that is the challenge. That is the interesting thing about marketing technology... these terms are just so evolving all the time. It's hard to like nail it down because at the end of the day, the vocabulary matters, right?"

He shared how their terminology evolved:

"Marketing data platform is how we were trying to sort of think about it in our first avatar. And it did not stick."

"5Tran, I would say define the word ELT, right? So it was all about I extract the data and I load them up in a destination, which is let's say Snowflake. And then you do whatever transformation you want to do downstream."

Future Development Plans

Looking ahead, Angshuman outlined several directions for future development:

"Adding more and more destinations is one of the key things, right? We do support all the four big players... GCP, Google, Azure, Microsoft, AWS, which is Amazon and then Snowflake. Those are the four big players, but there are more as well. Like Databricks is coming up."

He emphasized making the solution more accessible:

"A lot of my work is going after that market, like slightly smaller brands, just one developer or one marketing guy, and they need to sort of maintain it themselves."

Angshuman also mentioned AI-driven recommendations:

"Integrating it with AI is something that I am exploring, right? So actually giving suggestions of, hey, this is the data set that you should push. Let's say if I have already pushed Facebook ads data into Snowflake, what if I get recommendations is that you already have Google Ads, why don't you push Google Ads as well in the same structure?"

Finding TapClicks

For those interested in learning more about TapClicks, their TapData solutions and the new TapDataMax, Angshuman shared:

"We are active on LinkedIn. And I know Facebook. And then we have been exploring Reddit as well as a new channel. So would love for people to come in and say hi... LinkedIn is the big one for us because, we're typically focused on enterprises."

This conversation offers valuable insights for anyone interested in data integration, product management, and the evolving landscape of marketing technology solutions.