Cintric.exe
Accurate tracking and powerful analytics.
Cintric was my first significant startup. As CEO, I raised venture capital, opened offices in Cincinnati and Oakland, and sold the company to UberMedia in 2017. We eventually reached 1M+ MAUs contributing high quality background location data, the second highest in the industry at the time. This data was used to provide insights to enterprise retailers and other organizations.
Name
Cintric
Period
2014 -2017
I cofounded Cintric in 2014 after creating an innovative method to collect location data in the background of mobile apps without significant battery drain. I quickly realized this ability unlocked more than just location features in apps, and could provide powerful insights for retailers with location analytics.
We kept this two-sided theme in our business model. We provided free location analytics features to developers, in exchange for access to an anonymous version of their users location data. We then processed this data into consumer insights and made it available to large enterprise clients via a dashboard and datasets for use in analysis applications.
Mobile app developers want to build location-based features into their apps, but location technology is challenging to work with. Standard methods for tracking location in 2014 would typically drain smart phone’s batteries within 2 hours. Furthermore, location tech was relatively new at this time and difficult to integrate into existing app experiences. Developers had to write their own code for a large number of common use cases, in an environment where most of their work was being made more efficient with tools for payments, chat, and other functions from 3rd parties.
Large enterprise companies want to make data-driven decisions, but this becomes a slow and expensive process when data collection often means manual surveys. As a result, large enterprises are forced to make strategic decisions slowly and based on outdated understanding of consumer behavior.
For mobile app developers, we created a powerful and easy to use location tracking SDK. Where most background location tracking techniques drained smartphone batteries in under two hours, our SDK provided all-day accurate tracking using less than 5% of battery per day. This meant that developers could unlock innovative location features for their mobile apps.
For consumer insights analysts at large enterprises, we created a powerful analysis tool that allowed them to create highly customizable consumer segments. Analysts were able to study the behavior of these segments with pre-calculated insights
Software SDK's are a unique market to operate in. To begin, developers are a tough audience to sell to, particularly when dealing with novel technology. Location tech is challenging is a number of ways that aren't obvious before developers try to build on top of it. Accuracy is a challenge, along with battery drain, visit identification, and more. Without solving these challenges, many features are impossible to make work consistently.
Through customer research and personal experience, I adopted a strategy of taking a consumer software approach to developer tools. This meant a focus on developer marketing, user experience, and friendly documentation. I found that these enticed developers to look past their natural skepticism and focus more on the user experience and exciting features for their users.
