Why An Analytics Expert Left Agency Life to Become Haus' First Measurement Strategist

Fresh off building out two marketing analytics functions, Alyssa Francis came to Haus as the company’s first Measurement Strategist. She has quite literally set the standard for the Haus customer experience — so we picked her brain about her prolific analytics experience, pushing the testing status quo, and her favorite customer success story.

⏪ Tell us about your career before Haus.

The bulk of my career has been spent solving the sort of problems our customers at Haus face. For seven years, I managed and eventually led the marketing analytics function at 3Q Digital (now DEPT) — and I was actually brought on by [current Hausmate] Feliks Malts, who oversaw the larger decision science function there. 

During that time, I worked across hundreds of customers and led a team of about 15 data scientists. We did a lot of incrementality testing, forecasting, and implementing MMM solutions — really any type of analysis or measurement solution our customers needed. After that, I moved to climate finance startup Aspiration, where I again built out their marketing analytics team. 

🏠 How’d you end up landing at Haus?

While at Aspiration, we started looking for incrementality testing providers because our current agency wasn’t offering much rigor in that department. So one of my coworkers recommended Haus and connected me with Olivia Kory. As she took me through the product, I just couldn’t believe someone hadn’t already developed an incrementality platform in the way Haus had. 

Pretty soon into the call, she was like, “Do you wanna join?” And after hearing about the product and talking to Olivia, I didn’t hesitate. 

👀 What really caught your eye about Haus?

I had used incrementality competitors, and they just hadn’t been up to snuff. But meeting with the Haus team really solidified things. Between the easy-to-use UI and the focus on science, they were making it so easy for marketing teams — who usually don’t have much data science support — to start experimenting right away.

On the agency side, we were charging $10K a test — but here was a subscription service where you could run as many tests as you wanted with no limit. I was like, “I need to be here. This is clearly going to be front and center at all organizations going forward. It’s solving a real need.” 

🤝 Haus has a strong track record in terms of customers finding prolonged success. Why do you think that is?

I’d pinpoint three reasons why customers stick with Haus: 

• We’re transparent. We’re not just making results look good so the customer feels good. We’ll tell a customer if a result is noisy and calls for a retest. Because if our internal measurement strategy team doesn’t feel good about a result, why should a customer feel good about the result?
• We’re an extension of our customer’s team. Our customer’s agenda is our agenda. We really care about growing their business, making them more efficient as a business, and laddering up to their wider company-building goals.
• We push our customers. We aren’t okay with the status quo — and we want to make sure our customers aren’t okay with the status quo when it comes to testing. So we’ll push them. We’re not afraid to tell them straight up, “That won’t be a valuable learning for you — we recommend this instead.” We find things really click when you run interesting tests.

💡We’ve all seen that incrementality “lightbulb moment” when a skeptic becomes a believer. What’s your favorite example of that happening with a customer?

One example that sticks out is Newton Baby. They were a really sharp team using lots of different measurement solutions, but they were newer to incrementality. They didn’t beat around the bush — they really pushed us to show them the full power of testing.

Things really started to gel when we got more advanced in our testing. We suggested they test during promotions and that they pull back spending during promotions. This sophistication really resonated with them and now — fast forward to today — we’re their number one source of truth. 

When it comes to big, outside-the-box learnings, it’s Alyssa and the Measurement Strategy team who are pushing these moves. Want to learn more about the Hausmates helping customers succeed? Then check out our other episodes of Haus Spotlight.