Qubit

Overview
Qubit represents a “product” business model in the digital marketing industry where users pay a usage based subscription to access Qubits suite of website traffic analysis and website enhancement tools. Qubit offers a sophisticated set of tools via it’s SaaS platform that allows customers to segregate their website traffic and optimise the customer experience when using the website. There are also some work-for-hire integration services that the company offers in a complementary business model to support its products.

History

Founded in 2010 by four ex-Googlers, Qubit is headquartered in London with offices in New York, San Francisco, and Paris. Accel Partners, Balderton Capital, and Salesforce Ventures have invested over $36 million in the company.

Qubit have grown over the last 5 years and currently have revenue of £5.4 million. They are seeking to meet the needs of omnichannel businesses with analytics, segmentation, A/B testing, and web personalization tools.

Customers

Qubit’s customers are companies with e-commerce websites. These businesses are seeking to improve their websites via use of the tools and analytics provided by Qubit services.

Qubit has also created partnerships with consultancy firms that focus on improving web traffic and integrates the products into their value chain. This drives more customers to their platform.

Engagement  — Value Creation Proposition

Qubit has four main services that can work separately or in conjunction with each other in order to help the client company improve their customer experience of the website. This could be in allowing them to ensure the right users get the right information or to help increase spend, or provide insight into why customers choose not to complete purchases.

The A/B testing service allows the client company to quickly test the effect on customer interactions with their website when small details are changed.

The analytics suite allows the client company to track uses progress through their website and understand generalised usage patterns.

The web personalisation tools allow the client company to modify an ecommerce site to personalise the experience for different user groups. This tool can take data from other software and databases as inputs to help understand which customer has visited and what their personal needs are.

The tag management tools improve the ease with which tracking and information tags can be continuously updated with the client company’s e-commerce platform changes.

Delivery — Value Chain

Qubit writes their own software largely in Java and Javascript. They support both browser, tablets and mobile channels. The service runs on the AWS platform, giving it a lot of potential for reliability and scalability. Customers acquire the product by purchasing it online.

At the back end they have championed the use of emerging NoSQL technologies such as HBASE (based on Hadoop).

Monetisation — Value Capture

Qubits major source of revenue is via subscript fees for use of its SaaS platform. There is heavy price differentiations among its customers depending on their usage levels and which of the suite of tools are used. The average cost of using the service is $100,000 (Forrester report).

There is no evidence of income from other partnerships that might drive traffic to their platform or who might be able to make use of the aggregate website traffic data the platform collects.