42 (YC W14) Brings Big Data to Brick-and-Mortar Retailers | Hacker News Reader

42 (YC W14) Brings Big Data to Brick-and-Mortar Retailers

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61 pointsnickporter10 comments

Might want to pick a real name so people can find the company...

I think its pretty clever:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/42_(number)#The_Hitchhiker.27s_...

This would definitely alleviate hours of headache for my dad's retail business across each of his locations if it works. For someone who's not technical, but wastes tons of time in spreadsheets himself, how easy would it actually be to dive in and get started and how would that work exactly? He right now takes CSV exports from his POS and then starts trying to set up pivot tables, but it's not pretty.

I think the interesting thing is aside tracking sales and forecasting future inventory needs, what does your father glean from this analysis? Does he look for attachment rates for certain categories and then bundle said products? Does he look at trends during time of day to generate coupons and sales?

In summary what gauges does he look at, which levers does he pull as a result and what is the intended results of the said lever pulls?

What market segment are they trying to hit? Having done POS data analytics at a top 3 retailer, I know how sensitive they are about their sales data.

What kind of actionable insight are they able to generate?

We're currently focusing our efforts on medium-sized retailers. Think 5+ stores, 15k orders per month.

As far as actionable insight goes, we tell retailers things like:

- Which product categories are driving their sales

- Which customer segment they should be focusing on

- What are some of the trends in their data

I'd love to ask you a few questions about your POS data analytics experience. If you don't mind, could you send me an email so I can get your contact info? My email is: nick@42debut.com

Sent

When I saw the title of this, I thought, "This is very P&G". Then I saw that the founder came from P&G. That's the right background to make this work. It's more about solving business challenges ("How might the scanner data tell me about an out of stock that my ERP system is missing") rather than technical problems.

The "Try our demo" button under the "How it works" section doesn't do anything. I guess it should be the same as the first one before the fold?

Nice catch, thanks!

Fixed: https://github.com/42technologies/landing/commit/a0a0b96f3c9...

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