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Launch HN: ClearBrain (YC W18) – predictive models for app conversions and churn

83 pointsby bmahmoodover 7 years ago
Hi I’m Bilal, cofounder of ClearBrain (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clearbrain.com" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;clearbrain.com</a>). ClearBrain helps you automatically build predictive models for which of your users are most likely to convert or churn in your app. Think AmazonML for marketing analysts.<p>Our founding team comes from Optimizely &amp; Google where we built similar predictive tools for our marketing teams. At each company, we kept building the same components of a predictive pipeline - javascript snippets to collect data, ETL jobs to transform that data, and cron jobs to run a regression. We were spending hours a week maintaining these pipelines, but the time-consuming part wasn’t the algorithms (as they’re open sourced) it was the transformations.<p>So with ClearBrain we decided to automate the data transformation steps. We built our system in Spark ML (scala), Data Pipeline, and Go. Instead of instrumenting yet another Javascript snippet, we use existing data in Segment (YC S11) and Heap (YC W13) through standard integrations. And because every Segment&#x2F;Heap dataset has the same schema, our system can process it with the same transformations into a machine-readable feature matrix. When a customer selects a user action tracked in Segment&#x2F;Heap to predict, our transformed matrix is run through a logistic regression via Spark ML, and outputs a probabilistic score for each user to perform that action based on users who performed it in the past.<p>This distills the predictive modeling process to a simple UI to identify high-probability users in minutes. We’ve built the tool with marketers in mind, to help them identify which users may convert or churn, and export those users to marketing tools like Facebook Ads, Hubspot, etc. We’ve also found good reception from startups that have marketing objectives but lack the resources to deploy ML-driven campaigns themselves.<p>We look forward to feedback from the HN community! :)<p>Bilal

13 comments

gingerlimeover 7 years ago
Looks very interesting. We&#x27;re looking for something like this. The website talks also about the &quot;Facebook Aha moment&quot;... So would you guys also be able to predict which action(s) we should push our users towards to convert better? and which action(s) are less important?<p>Any plans to connect to Amplitude? and&#x2F;or if we feed events directly to you via a JS API? (we don&#x27;t use heap or segment, that&#x27;s why I&#x27;m asking)
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tparkover 7 years ago
Bilal nice to meet you - have a high growth SAAS startup that this looks perfect for, what&#x27;s the best way to get onboarded and give this a material try?
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altvaliover 7 years ago
Are you concerned about the European Union’s new (General Data Protection Regulation)[<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syncedreview.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;will-new-eu-regulations-starve-data-hungry-deep-learning-models&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;syncedreview.com&#x2F;2018&#x2F;01&#x2F;31&#x2F;will-new-eu-regulations-...</a>]?
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zechsover 7 years ago
How correlated is your models output with a simple measure of the volume of interactions a user has with an app?<p>Main question...is this a domain where ML really adds a lot of value beyond the basic concept of High Interaction (lots of time spent and clicks&#x2F;pages visited) -&gt; High conversion Probability?
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rickyyeanover 7 years ago
If you use Heap or Segment, using ClearBrain is a no brainer. Good job Bilal and team!
dsirokerover 7 years ago
This is a great team and product!
vanhowenover 7 years ago
Bilal,<p>Hi and congrats on ClearBrain! Hope all is well, super excited to see where this goes.
gwintrobover 7 years ago
Love what Bilal and the team at ClearBrain is working on. There&#x27;s really no integration work if you already use Segment for analytics.
dahx4Eevover 7 years ago
What kinds of ML models and algorithms are used? Can I train models based on my own data?
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vumaashaover 7 years ago
I think it was a great choice to choose Heap&#x2F;Segment as data providers.
richardfeynmanover 7 years ago
I&#x27;ve been using ClearBrain for a few months. It works. Give it a try.
alexcnwyover 7 years ago
How is this different than Custora (also YC alumn)?
stvnittover 7 years ago
I&#x27;m not really familiar with this space, but is there a non-enterprise option here? I would love to try something like this out but the price point is too high for me.
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