Case Study: Yofi
Yofi is a platform that enables you to better understand your customers, their intentions, and the best way to interact with them.
Introduction:
In 2021, 35.7% of Online Black Friday Shoppers were bots and fake accounts. Many of these bad actors (bots, arbitrageurs, fraudsters, etc.) are undetected and have rapidly expanded from tickets and limited-release items into anything that can be flipped for profit. Individuals have multiple identities; whether unintentional or malicious, it skews critical data for operating the business - forecasting inventory, determining the success of marketing campaigns, increasing customer lifetime value, and more. Digital identity is essential for a successful brand.
Yofi is a platform that enables you to better understand your customers, their intentions, and the best way to interact with them. We solve this for brands by providing granular customer and product-level recommendations based on your genuine customers’ intentions and desires. Stop guessing and start knowing with Yofi!
We have, and we do not want others to go through the same struggle. We created Yofi because digital identity and customer operations are essential for all brands, and the tools used were expensive and ineffective.
Executive Summary:
Problem: Everything being consumed digitally is being skewed because everyone has multiple identities online -either intentionally or unintentionally. This causes businesses to overestimate customers, incorrectly forecast inventory and sales, and make expensive, large cascading decisions based on misleading data.
Market: We believe that the Digital Identity market will be $5.12B by 2030 because the ability to identify customers and optimize their interaction is essential for the success of brands. It impacts the entire business from marketing campaigns, reverse logistics, and customer retention in both eCommerce and subscription services.
Solution: We empower brands to better understand their customers, their intentions, and the best way to interact with them.
Team: We are a global team of problem-solvers from Argentina, China, Uzbekistan, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Regardless of the cultural and geographic differences, we are united in our mission of demystifying who is on the internet.
Hiring: Here are the top three roles Yofi is trying to fill:
Data Engineer
Design
Marketing
Case Study: Yofi
Tell me about the problem the startup solves.
We believe that everything digitally consumed is being skewed, and this is causing massive issues for businesses. It is causing incorrect sales and inventory forecasting, determining the success of marketing campaigns, understanding the products your customers want, and much more. We are determined to help businesses solve these issues by empowering them to better understand their customers, their intentions, and the best way to engage with them.
We know the importance of identity, as we have experienced the expensive mistake of not knowing our genuine consumers. It has forced us to misforecast sales and inventory but, most importantly, lose an accurate understanding of our consumers. We see analytic tools that do not want to focus on identity, as its deemed security, while security companies neglect analytics because it is outside their scope. We see resellers as a new, hidden sales channel for brands, and we want to differentiate it from direct-to-consumer sales and optimize both channels.
In 2021, 35.7% of Black Friday Shoppers in 2021 were bots and fake accounts. This issue is only going to get worse, as people continue to make money and find other accretive opportunities. We are reaching an inflection point and need to better understand whether we are interacting with a human or not on the internet. Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter being stopped because they are trying to determine the number of bots on the platform will start to become the new norm of due diligence.
We are professionally motivated by the value our solution can unlock for brands. We are personally motivated because everyone has paid too much for a concert ticket that has sold out or been inundated with marketing emails that are not applicable to me. We want to solve this problem because we believe we are truly solving a problem for our customers’ consumer. We all want to be able to get the products we want online and not be gouged to pay more.
Tell me about the market the startup serves.
Our initial target customers have been stores in the collectibles space (sneakers, trading cards, toys, and anything with limited supply). Everyone in collectibles has been fighting bots and resellers for years, and the beauty is that the people working within this industry are true fans. We are helping them professionally and personally, as we are helping ensure that they are prioritizing loyal fans like themselves!
We are former botters, who left the “darkside” to help operators like Nike, Adidas, and Gucci fight against bots. So, we know the large impact of working at some of the largest retailers in the world. Before starting Yofi, we talked to about 15-30 businesses, which echoed and validated the same pain points we experienced.
Brands don’t have an accurate picture of their customer data. Bots and exclusive releases are just the tips of the iceberg. We have seen that brands struggle to know the accurate number of unique customers, as it is either being skewed intentionally or unintentionally. We need to take our understanding of bots and bad actors that we identify at the order level and take it to the account level, so brands can begin to demystify the legitimacy of their customers and data.
Everyone is too busy to be looking at data. People either do not have enough time to look at their data or are overwhelmed with the amount of data. People want recommendations and actions, not insights. People are busy and want something that provides consistent value with as little time consumption as possible. Though nuisance, providing recommendations that are packaged and easily consumable helps the end-user more than insights that still require interpretation.
We want to help brands to better understand their customers, their intentions, and the best way to interact with them. Right now, we are focused on helping brands better know their customers and their intentions, such as identifying bad actors - bots, arbitrageurs, serial returners. Our next step is integrating this knowledge into marketing and customer support, which will allow brands to better understand marketing campaigns that resonate with individual consumers and clients to prioritize in the support queue.
The closest competitor is EQL, as we have both initially focused on looking at mitigating bots for releases. We are tangentially similar but quite different, as they are focused on being a raffle service. We are focused on digital identity and recommendations, where we flag these bad actors and exclude them for critical decision-making (i.e., inventory and sales forecasting, marketing campaigns, fulfillment times, etc.).
Once we empower brands to better understand their customers and the number of unique accounts, we plan on becoming a recommendation engine to increase our TAM. We want to take that knowledge and incorporate it into all aspects of the business, such as curating individualized marketing campaigns and understanding the amount of inventory to order. We view every aspect of the business being impacted and want to create recommendations to enable the business to become more efficient and grow faster.
Tell me about the solution the startup created.
We are different because we are integrated at the checkout layer, while “traditional” bot detection companies are integrated at the network layer. I would say the largest differentiation is our focus, as we are myopically focused on identifying these bots and bad actors and preventing them from making a large cascading impact. We know the massive impact on the business from these downstream decisions, as we have experienced it and do not see a company attempting to solve it. We believe we can break down silos of data and unify the understanding of customers through the Yofi platform.
We focus on digital identity and using that foundation to create a clean and accurate data set for businesses. A lot of brands boast about the number of accounts they have and the growth; however, we know this can be misleading because more accounts do not always mean more customers or revenue. We want to identify and exclude the unprofitable accounts while prioritizing the profitable ones. We use network science and machine learning on graphs, which gives our analytics an edge over the standard “pointwise” approach that most predictive analytics tools use.
We have a differentiated business model, as we know once someone installs and sees the impact and applications of knowing their customer, it becomes an eye-opening experience. They begin to fully grasp the overarching benefits to the entire business and how it provides an immediate value to them. We know from our experience that some of the hardest fights are internal with finance teams. Thus, we are always attempting to quantify our value with our client impact metric and showing the ROI of every recommendation. We want to arm our users with concrete evidence and facts to show the positive value that they have generated for their business through using Yofi.
We are focused on “how things are done” and not necessarily “who is doing them,” so we can understand the patterns of individuals. We will be able to discern if someone is a bot, serial returner, or a new customer on your site and the best way to engage with them. So, as we scale, we will have better and more niche patterns that will improve our business model.
We are getting closer to product-market promise and believe we will achieve product-market fit once we are truly a digitally consumable solution. We want people to come to our website, see the use cases, and resonate with the messaging and installation. Once we achieve this digital consumption in a repeatable form, we believe we will be closer to achieving product-market fit.
Client Impact is our North Star metric, as we want all of our recommendations to create value for the business. We are constantly showing the benefit of knowing your customer, whether it is removing bad actors from marketing campaigns, increase in online conversion through our segmentation, or reduction in reverse logistics. We know if we can successfully provide quantifiable value for our clients, then Yofi will be successful.
We are all former botters and arbitrageurs and still are active within the cook groups. So, we see all the stores, products, and loopholes that people are targeting. We use this as a base for reaching out to initial customers, saying we can help you prevent this and offer them a pilot. We have been successful in converting many of these pilots by stopping the bad actors but educating and solving the large footprint these bad actors cause.
We have developed our sales process, and it is always a work in process. We believe our solution can be used to improve an entire business, but know that this can be overwhelming and complex initially. So, we have created three pilot segments that we propose based on the customers' biggest problem that we can solve. This focus and clearly defined goals have helped us immensely to win customers, then expand to other parts of their business.
Tell me about the team behind the startup.
Alex is a scientist and problem solver who has a brilliant mind for applying Machine Learning to solving human and business problems. She has successfully pioneered and applied machine learning initiatives at Nike and Apple that generated hundreds of millions in value for both companies. Alex has a boldness and confidence that helps navigate our team through uncertainty. Her confidence permeates into the entire team and allows us to take-on massive clients, grow as individuals, and achieve our vision.
Andrii is a visionary engineer, who can jump from Russian to Mandarin and Machine Learning to Marketing. He truly can turn any idea into a reality. He provides the delivery and believes there is a solution to everything, no matter the craziness of the proposed solution. Andrii is an incredible teacher and innovator. He can communicate his brilliance and elevate the entire company, as everyone always learns something new when talking to Andrii. He has the patience and enthusiasm to ensure that the team is constantly learning and getting better.
Jordan built a startup within IBM and scaled it to $350m/year in revenue, which hosted some of the largest companies in the world. He has the product experience needed to ensure that Yofi is successfully meeting our vision and providing constant value for our customers. Jordan has a calm demeanor and is able to navigate the rollercoaster of startup life. He is able to find the positives from the negative experiences and remain focused on the vision that we are delivering.
We have a company value of “respectful disagreement” where we actively encourage team members to vocalize their opinion and the solution they believe is best. We have been cultivating a culture of empowerment and support, as that is the best way to grow - individually and collectively. We are always available, including being on troubleshooting calls at 1:00 am even when we can’t contribute to the tech, just to provide flexible support for any periphery tasks that come up.
We are extremely fortunate to have an incredible team who deeply believes in the future of Yofi. We have had junior engineers correctly challenge our leaders, and team members who have stayed up all night to solve issues, and most importantly, every individual at Yofi feels accountability, acknowledging that this is their company. Nothing makes us happier than knowing that our entire team feels connected and ownership over the company. One of our favorite moments was when one of our team members’ daughters drew new logos for our rebranding - it showed the impact beyond work.
We have a north star metric of client impact and value that we have embedded into our decision-making framework. We are always contemplating and figuring out the solution that will provide the most value to our client.
Here are five of our first hires:
Michael Klear - Michael was a Senior Machine Learning Engineer at Nike and Coinbase, where he specialized in Search and Account Takeover.
Adam Mellen - Adam is a a former full-stack Magento developer working with many high-volume eCommerce brands predominantly in the fashion sector.
Abror Aliboyev - Abror has deep experience in building scalable and serverless platforms in AWS.
Eugene Grytsenko - Eugene has experience building APIs, Bots, and Middleware for the largest banks in South America.
Matt Su - Matt was an engineering lead for Tencent and Shopee.
Who are you trying to hire, and why?
The top three roles we are trying to fill are:
Data Engineer - We need an individual that can ensure that the data is flowing correctly in our pipeline. If we have a blockage of data, it has the potential to impact our rankings and analysis; thus, ensuring a smoothly flowing pipeline is essential for our success.
Design - Providing a seamless experience is required for any successful company. We believe people are too busy to look at data and that identity impacts the entire business. We need to seamlessly integrate to be able to effectively break down silos, provide trust in our recommendations, and much more. Successful design is at the heart of achieving our goal.
Marketing - Our message is always being refined, as we learn more about our customers. We would love someone to help us consolidate our messaging and break it down into one-two sentences, so anyone who comes to our website can clearly understand it.
We are an early stage startup, so the career trajectory is becoming the lead or head of the departments, as we scale the business.
The unique perk of our company is having a core value of everyone needing a “reason to skip work” and for some it’s skiing on a powder day or watching Manchester United. We truly believe that people need legitimate time to skip work to pursue their passions and invigorate their happiness. Instead of creating friction or hiding it, we want our employees to be celebrated and rewarded for their passions.
Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:
Stephanie Horbaczewski, Founder of Vody: Vody is an ML optimization and maturation suite to accelerate model development and supercharge performance built for teams that build their own models.
Geraldo Ramos, Founder of Moises Systems: Moises System is a Music-tech platform offering musicians and producers a suite of AI tools such as audio separation, pitch/beats/chord detection, metronome, tempo changer, and mastering.
Arsalan Bashir, Founder of LiveDocs: LiveDocs allows you to create documents that update themselves.
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