These are unprecedented times.

Steve Jobs once said, “customers don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Now, personalized recommendations exist anywhere from e-commerce (Amazon) to entertainment ( Netflix, YouTube, and Spotify). Their recommendation systems are key in driving revenue and making them successful companies. Even Amazon increased its revenue by 35% from their recommendation system and email campaigns.

In Kurvv’s quest to make the power of machine learning accessible to business users, we are happy to say that our Life-Time-Value (LTV) bases Segmentation solution now also works for eCommerce customer additional to hotel (hospitality) customers. (limited to Shopify & Square users but more is on the way) Our LTV based segmentation models predict how valuable new customers and leads will be to your business over their lifetime, and group them into low, medium and high value categories. We do this by analyzing historical data to identify which attributes are most often associated with high-value customers.

Leadership lessons from a scene from ‘Finding Nemo’.

I’m a great Pixar fan. I still remember the awe I felt when I first watched Toy Story and even greater growing awe as I learned about Pixar’s journey as a company. Many leadership lessons can be learned from Pixar’s journey, and there are no shortage of materials to help you do so. Books, case studies, documentaries. (If you don’t know the story I highly recommend reading ‘Creativity, Inc’ by Ed Catmull) .

The Bavarian Lodge is a family-owned hotel in the popular tourist community of Leavenworth, Washington, that offers all the amenities of a modern hotel with the feel of a country inn. Located near the mountain community’s cultural center, the Lodge serves guests from around the world looking to enjoy a wide variety of activities in every season, from winter sports to summer getaways. Providing top-notch service and understanding the needs of its customers are among the Lodge’s most important business values.

You already know how machines learn.

There has been much said and written about good and bad ideas in the startup world. Most notable and influential to me being  Paul Graham’s essay around its counter intuitiveness [1] and Peter Thiel’s Venn diagram of ‘looks like a bad idea’ and ‘is a good idea'[2].

Excel and structured spreadsheets have been a fantastic tool for marketers and business owners for years. It brings structure to our data and helps us summarize and understand the reality of our data.

“What is the unique insight?” This question  kept coming up when introducing our startup idea. We have three, but to be fair each by themselves are not unique (ask any data scientist). The uniqueness comes from combining them.