A Case Study...

Finding the Sweet Spot: Startup Marketing, Product Development and Research

Data Robotics is a Silicon Valley startup company in its third year. It owns proprietary technology that provides non-technical computer users and business owners with an easy means of storing, protecting and expanding their data storage capacity, without having to understand complex storage technologies such as SAN, NAS or RAID. In 2007 they launched Drobo.

Before launching the product in mid 2007, the questions facing Data Robotics were: "What is the correct early market for this technology? What is the best product configuration of features for the user? What is the sweet spot pricing -- not too high, and not too low" Time was of the essence, because crucial product development decisions needed to be made on an aggressive schedule.

"We needed to validate our company's assumptions against real buyers, and we wanted to calibrate our plans against the marketplace," commented Mark Fuccio, Senior Director Product Management.

Qualitative interviews identified preliminary notions about their market "sweet spot." Data Robotics then engaged Wilson Research Group to quickly gain conclusive results about their target audience in the storage market.

Wilson Research Group worked with Data Robotics with six different audience surveys. These investigated usage of storage device technology, user needs for storage capacity, growth rates, incidence of and reasons for data loss, buying habits, pricing and connection technologies. Some surveys focused on consumers, the other on businesses.

Unique to this project and of high importance to the executive team at Data Robotics was their direct access to Wilson Research Group's state-of-the-art analysis tool called ExecStats. This reporting system is an executive level online data mining system, operating like an interactive "dashboard to the data."

By pointing and clicking, the marketing team could see how each segment of their primary markets answered all key questions in the survey. The team could pose and get answers to questions in seconds, often times answering questions asked in a meeting. ExecStats enabled viewing every product choice and price point choice made by respondents, and, more importantly, exactly why the respondent made that choice. Open ends were correlated with each market segment.

"We were delighted with the insights from our surveys. We were able to identify which pieces of our technology buyers valued the highest, and why. ExecStats is a great tool, we consult it regularly to mine more insights from this research. Wilson Research is a great partner, I highly recommend them. We continue to partner with them on a regular basis." (from Mark Fuccio, Data Robotics) (www.datarobotics.com). The latest collaboration is an ongoing Web Site Visitor Survey that focuses on current Drobo customers satisfaction and on "customers-to-be" who visit the Drobo.com site. This research continues to track the "sweet spots" for Data Robotics.