Startup Lessons: Impulse Analytics
The path for startups can be treacherous. In our series “Startup Lessons,” we examine new MBA startups at the ground level to understand how they succeed.
Years after earning his MBA from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, French-born 38-year-old entrepreneur Vincent Chevalier, like many in his position, didn’t start with the intention to build his own business.
Prior to earning a role as an Assistant Brand Manager with Kraft Food Group and a Product Manager stint with French beverage distribution company Lixir, Chevalier earned his undergraduate degree from EDHEC, a business school in Lille. And after coming to the U.S. and earning his MBA in 2011 and subsequent analytic managerial roles at Entertainment Arts (EA) and Udemy, it’d be easy to say that he was already on a remarkably strong career path.
That path, however, isn’t always enough for some. Speaking with Chevalier, founder and managing director of the San Francisco-based Impulse Analytics, he discusses that it grew from a need to experience more in the industry and his general dissatisfaction with marketing.
Impulse Analytics
“Marketing at the time was frustrating,” he says bluntly. “It was hard to attribute the impact of your marketing actions. I wanted to be able to build a quantitative model to better understand the holistic impact of our investment. At EA we were able to gain significant insight about our global ad strategy thanks to marketing mix modeling.”
The measurable impact is directly what Impulse Analytics provides for a multitude of online businesses. How is advertising performing? What can be learned from its successes and failures? And how can it be optimized for future earnings? Tackling the immense amount of available out there can be remarkably difficult, even for seasoned companies like Yelp! Thankfully, Impulse Analytics can help compartmentalize all of these necessities while boasting a high return on investment.
Chevalier prioritizes the quality of companies when looking for potential new clients. “My job gets easier with good products,” he says. “We focus on when we believe in the product. Usually start-up funded with the potential to grow rapidly with the service we provide. A good level of communication and good international development.”
While building other business has become his obvious priority through the company, building Impulse Analytics from its initial concept had its own hurdles.
“So what’s challenging to me is finding the most important members of the team,” Chevalier recalls. “The challenge is finding some analysts that have the potential to learn quickly data-driven marketing and scale large paid advertising account. I’m lucky, I have a team of four people, that was the main barrier to growth. At the beginning I was managing it all myself.”
Much of those lessons are learned as the process of building Impulse Analytics continues to evolve, but the foundation for much of it comes from his time at Booth.
“The MBA was obviously very essential in the learnings, creating tools and understanding statistics,” he remembers, specifically highlighting the importance of long-term statistical values and growth.
Social media data, when it comes to online business, may seem like an unbreakable monolith of intel, which is why the competition for analytics businesses continues to explode. As the fight for supremacy in the market grows, Chevalier and his team’s raw understanding of statistical patterns gives him an obvious advantage—one that many MBAs should take note of.
Find out more about Impulse Analytics and its services today.
About the Author
Matthew Korman
Matthew Korman is a writer on MetroMBA. Since graduating from Rowan University with a degree in journalism and political science, Matthew has worked as a music industry writer and promoter, a data analyst, and with numerous academic institutions. His works have appeared in publications such as NPR and Sports Illustrated.
