From 0 to 1. Journey of a startup in development

We are very much aware that some of you have known us from the very beginning. Our community of marketers has validated that we're on the right track, and they have helped us have a clearer understanding of what they need and what Gretel needs to look like to address those needs.

Although we still can't say that this will be the final, one-of-a-kind version, we now have a clear idea of what Gretel will look like and how we plan to make it; are you interested in knowing how we ended up here? Keep reading!

🤠 The beginnings: the what and the to who.

Let's start at the beginning: our mission. Our founders, Marti and Alex, were clear that they wanted to build something big and "revolutionize the way people work, making employees smarter, insight-driven, and better at their jobs."

Make the workspace better? Something like that! It is ambitious, but achievable with a great team and product.

Having clearly defined the objective, we selected a target (validated by thousands of early adopters): who in this world deals with more chaos with the information they manage on a daily basis, and who needs more help? Marketing departments.

Marketing departments have at their disposal more than 7,000 different tools to manage campaigns. 7,000 — that's not a number a human can handle with peace of mind. 

Additionally, and unfortunately, many marketing departments tend to have few resources, few people, and very ambitious goals. They tend to be departments that try to resort to any external help, no matter how little, to manage their day-to-day work.

“The way we work is changing. We need to make smarter, faster decisions and be data-driven while also being collaborative."

"The way we work is changing. We need to make smarter, faster decisions and be data-driven while also being collaborative. But are we unlocking all the potential our internal information has? Not with the manual and responsive answer tools we are still using, such as Dashboards or search engines.” - Martí, founder.

🤓 First steps: trial and error.

With the target and the mission in mind, we set out to make Gretel, a tool created to assist marketing professionals to streamline their work and acting as an ally.

We made the first version of our product, which was far from what we have now because we were too ambitious. We were trying to cover too many bases, and we were not building what we wanted.

After months of planning, developing, and testing, we gradually began to get more specific feedback from our early adopters. Without their assistance, we would not have been able to develop the tool we are making right now.

Marketers are missing opportunities and making decisions based on outdated and inaccurate data to this day.

"When we said we were user-centric, we meant it. Marketers are missing opportunities and making decisions based on outdated and inaccurate data to this day. Gretel is the first AI-powered digital assistant that proactively delivers the insights you need in real-time to make quick and impactful decisions in your work." Marti-Founder Gretel.

🤖 Following the path: product validation. 

It appears that we are getting closer to the objective, or this first modest goal, that we set more than six months ago: to create value for marketers.

We found we needed to build something different, adding value to the existing tools that find the information that marketers use regularly and reactively. They offer you valuable ways of creating reports and dashboards, but still, there are missed opportunities.

Gretel aims to discover the unknown, and help marketers control the different campaigns they manage at the same time, optimizing the budget spent on each channel. We wanted to position Gretel as the first AI-powered digital marketing assistant.

A tool for marketers that can provide real-time information about anomalies and campaign performance so that marketers do not miss out on potential opportunities. -Martí. Founder

They are overwhelmed with the amount of data they have, and hiring a data scientist for the marketing team is not going to solve this problem.

“(Marketers) They are overwhelmed with the amount of data they have, and hiring a data scientist for the marketing team is not going to solve this problem. It’s only going to cause more chaos. So let Gretel discover it for you.” - Martí, founder.

We validated the beta version with dozens of users and got the initial feedback—both positive and negative, of course. Here are a few examples of the good ones:

• ”It will save me a lot of time when I have to collect key insights for reporting.”
• ”I will no longer miss important events and I’ll be able to react immediately.”
• ”Finally, my team and I will be aligned and data-driven”
• ”If Gretel can alert me about the anonymous information and when something is wrong in real-time, this is a game changer.”
• ”I was considering hiring a data analyst, but this will no longer be necessary.”
• ”Certainly a feed I can see myself checking daily before starting my day.”
• "I feel that whenever there is a fire, I'll be late. If Gretel could back me up and notify me before anyone else, I would pay everything for this."
• "Marketers need to be managing more than 10 projects at a time. An app that alerts you if something goes wrong should be a must."

🤩 And now what?

We will keep growing, moving forward, and adapting our product until we have the best tool for you.

We are still looking for early adopters and visionaries who want to contribute to our mission and who want to help us create a valid tool for marketing people.

If you want to be one of them, send us a message or fill out the form and help us improve!

Gretel team: December 2022.