Hi James and thanks for your questions 
Subscription analytics is a category of product, and one that we lead in. However, over the years we realized that what we’re building is something that fundamentally works by ingesting subscription/revenue data from different primary data sources, cleaning and normalising that data, and then we generate subscription metrics and other revenue reports off of that. Now from that those datasets you can do Subscription Analytics, but you could also send those metrics into an external data warehouse perhaps, or into Segment to be used elsewhere in the organisation. At that point the use case is not for doing subscription analytics but for using ChartMogul as part of the data stack of a company.
It was this thought process that led us to articulate this category vision for a Subscription Data Platform, which is what ChartMogul has become. One of the things a subscription data platform enables is subscription analytics, and we certainly do that too, but the product category we’re creating is a subscription data platform which has a broader set of use cases.
- Do you have any internal definitions / measures of how you can confidently say you have succeeded in creating a category? And if so, it would be fascinating if you can share them.
I think we were part of a group of companies who created the subscription analytics category. I think it took a few years before that became clearly a category. We’re not there yet with Subscription Data Platform, we only launched that in March. I think when we start hearing others talking about their need for a subscription data platform, without necessarily talking about needing ChartMogul, then we will have been successful, it will likely take a couple years.
- Finally – what have been the toughest challenges so far in creating a new category?
I think the hardest part is keeping up the momentum, you have to remember to do it, to keep pushing, to continually publish content and thought leadership pieces, PR, etc. Zuora are probably the masters of this in the subscription space.