Company: &facts
Founder(s): Sohaib Ahmed
Website: https://www.andfacts.com/
Description: &facts is a market research platform that helps e-commerce businesses better understand what their customers want.
&facts aggregate data from a library of sources to provide curated insights to users. &facts’ insights help e-commerce businesses make more informed decisions e.g. identify which products they should invest in next based on consumer interest, understand seasonality of their products and what wording their customers prefer to use to help optimise their marketing.
The start of the &facts journey coincided with the start of a global pandemic. 70% of UK e-commerce businesses fail within the first 5-years, and a lack of market understanding is one of the leading reasons. At the time, little did we know how COVID would change consumer behaviour, however habits and interests across every industry have changed. Businesses have been left trying to figure out how to navigate this changing landscape.
Whilst large businesses have the resources to invest in experts and data, to understand what their customers want, unfortunately small businesses do not.
&facts are developing an AI-driven insights platform to help e-commerce businesses better understand what their customers want. This will provide them with a curated dashboard that empowers them to understand their industry and market, and the next thing their customers are looking for.
&facts’ challenge has been to navigate the broad landscape of small businesses to understand their specific challenges but also navigating around the vast amounts of data available to provide truly valuable and actionable insights. They’ve partnered with the likes of Aston University and their PhD researchers to carry out feasibility studies (which showed a tremendous need for such solution in the industry).
In the past year, &facts nailed what this solution looks like by first-hand understanding the challenges e-commerce and other small businesses are going through, as well as working alongside experts. The company have developed a number of tools that organically have achieved over 1,000 users, and their testing of insights with potential users has already achieved outcomes such as doubling click-through-rate on PPC ads.
In the year, &facts have welcomed to their team:
- An exceptionally talented Data Scientist with a PhD in Data Analytics who has spent his career developing complex Machine Learning models.
- An industry-renowned academic as an advisor; Prof. Mark Hart who has spent 35 years researching small businesses, is the deputy director for the Governments Enterprise Research Centre and the academic lead of the Goldman Sachs Small Business Programme.
&facts have also joined the Allia Impact Accelerator due to their commitment to deliver positive social impact through their platform.
&facts are focused on democratising data and empowering small businesses to make better decisions. Their platform development has been underway for a number of months, and is on target to launch next month (May 2021), already with an extensive waitlist for their product.
In addition, this year &facts look to raise their first investment, provide valuable insights to over 1,000 users and become revenue generating. The company are also going to continue developing the platform; adding new data sources, integration with platforms such as Shopify as well as machine learning functionality that provides FTSE100-level forecasting ability to small businesses.
