RevTech Fellows Spring 2021 Case Study:
GroundLevel Insights
James Motsinger
Duke University, 2022
“As someone who worked with RevTech and their portfolio company, I’ve learned so much in twelve weeks about what it means to be a value-add as an operator in Venture Capital. Working with GroundLevel Insights has been such an eyeopening experience about what it looks like to be scrappy and get a business off the ground.”
Key Objectives:
- Learn about location-based data and its uses by understanding how organizations leverage data to engage with their customers
- Understand insights that businesses wanted from their clients, such as habits, trends, and feedback
- Improve data visualization and reporting to future clients and pilot users to highlight trends and discover insights based on customer habits
- Develop a framework to improve ongoing and future pilot users to see usage, valuable features, reporting visualization, and next steps for the GLI platform
Results & End Impact
- Researched 47 potential partners and competitors
- Conducted an interview with a current pilot user who recently lost a partnership with a large jewelry firm, but was going to rekindle that partnership since they saw that over 200 weekly visitors came from or went to that store right after visiting
- Created the foundations for their platforms output in a two-page report that would most likely have saved the team 10 hours of time
Key Learnings
- Being flexible in a start-up is critical, in addition to speaking up about how you can add value.
- Location-based data is vital to empower businesses to understand their customers’ habits and up-to-date trends even better than traditional consulting reports.
- As a data-driven individual, how you present the data is just as necessary as the data itself.
- Always take a step back to see why you are doing what you are doing; it’s easy to find a next step, but making sure you’ve genuinely evaluated your options is even more important than taking the next step.
- Relationships drive venture capital, and trying to quantify and measure your goals is essential to make sure you are making progress.
Paying it Forward & Next Steps
- I will continue to serve GLI in the future since they’ve been so critical to my development.
- I’m going to focus even more on developing relationships in funds that I am interested in to get a job after my MBA in VC.
- I will mentor first-year students and those interested in venture capital to guide them not to make as many mistakes and take more risks than I have.