Toplyne

It's raining G2 badges here at Toplyne. 🌧️ We've made the podium in 6 categories of the 2024 G2 Fall Reports, including Customer Revenue Optimization, Marketing Account Intelligence, Predictive Analytics, E-Commerce Personalization, Retargeting, Identity Resolution, and Lead Scoring. Here's our pick of the 44 badges: 🏆 Leader 🏆 Users Love Us 🏆 Best Support 🏆 Easiest to Do Business With 🏆 Easiest to Use 🏆 High Performer Read more about it here: https://lnkd.in/ghgV4xH7

Are we building up to a Black Swan Black Friday? In many ways, we might be in for a Black Swan holiday season this year. Holiday sales in the US alone are expected to reach a record $1.35 trillion in 2024. CivicScience predicts that 50% of shoppers will start shopping before Thanksgiving. This is known to be the time of the irrational shopper. (Google "Black Friday Nightmares", thank us later) But... a lot of the irrationality of the Black Friday season begins to vaporize thanks to the law of large numbers - and presents crucial considerations to brands prepping for the 2024 festive season. This is our pick of 8 key stats every marketer should have in their pocket while prepping for BFCM 2024. https://lnkd.in/g7tqA7SU

Overheard at Toplyne: "If there's no free will in something as simple as an eCommerce checkout event, there is no free will anywhere." This is a widely researched field. A check-out event specifically ultimately boils down to three key actors in the brain. 😇 The pleasure system The ‘nucleus ambens’ - The feeling of "the chase." The ‘nucleus ambens’, many thousands of years later, has replaced the feeling of being on the tail of prey with the feeling of finding a good deal on a pair of yoga pants. 😰 The pain center The insula - The yang to our ‘nucleus ambens’ yin. The insula serves reminders of the familiar feeling of money deducted from our bank accounts. 🤝 A negotiator The medial prefrontal cortex - The rational center of the brain. The prefrontal cortex acts as the negotiator between the nucleus ambens and the insula to influence the final decision. But as consumer psychologist Dr Dimitri Tsivrikos put it, the medial prefrontal cortex is a flaky little thing: "Brain studies have shown that when we are excited by a bargain, this interferes with your ability to clearly judge whether it is actually a good offer or not." Screw rational decision making. Good bye, free will. Add to cart. Check out part 1 of the Toplyne feature on the origins & psychology of Black Friday bargains. credits: Aamir Kanchwala https://lnkd.in/gN8xWy_8

This year, 129 of the 195 countries across the globe will officially celebrate 'Black Friday'. It's the retailer's ultimate fantasy - a simple sales event celebrated as a shopping 'festival'. This is the Black Friday playbook. And it works. Amazon Prime Day, Flipkart Big Billion Days, Alibaba's Singles' Day - all of these started off as attempts to emulate the Black Friday playbook. But what is this playbook and how did we get here? Check out the full story in part 1 of our series on BFCM. https://lnkd.in/dTb6Kqnm

New on Top of the Lyne: Codifying how Liquid Death built a brand on principles that underscore every single ad they have ever run. This is for you if you’re a specific type of brand/product: That is if you’re placed in a crowded category with a primary differentiation that is looking to drive D2C and in-store retail purchases while sustaining brand relevance and consistency. ➡️ Principle 1: Build your brand on opinion. Liquid Death's 4 pillars of brand are: 1. Novelty: "Water in a can" 2. Irreverence: At the core of the brand's marketing is a message everyone relates with: "I hate marketing" 3. Sustainability: "Death to plastic" 4. Be entertaining. Google Liquid Death's crowning achievement: The Timewaster 5000. ➡️ Principle 2: Everyone wants something that they’re not supposed to have. “If you want teens to think something is cool, you market it to people in their 20s. This is why energy drinks market to teens. 17-year-olds don’t think Monster is cool, but 12-year-olds do.” - Mike Cessario ➡️ Principle 3: Virality lurks in the dumbest places in your head. Mike thought to himself, “What can I call this thing so that if someone sees it in a store, I am willing to bet that they will share that? ➡️ Principle 4: Use the frameworks of a known category in a new category. Liquid Death took the frameworks of marketing that have been time-tested, tried, and well-understood in the Craft Beer category and took it to a category completely unfamiliar to these frameworks: Water. ➡️ Principle 5: Your brand is a professional wrestler. No one actually believes that the Undertaker is a dead man who burnt his younger brother Kane, during their childhood and subsequently helped develop Kane’s pyromania, fire-manipulating powers, and supernatural strength. People are willing to entertain the deeper relationship with the plot and characters despite the obvious facade of WWE. Mike makes the case that brand-building is no different. Read our full feature of the art & science of how Liquid Death runs here (Link in comments)

Coming in hot - G2 Summer Reports 🔥 G2 Reports are always super special because they echo the opinion that matters the most: our customers. This summer, our customers have awarded Toplyne over 40 badges: 👑 A leader across three reports 📈 A high performer across thirty-one reports 🤝 Best support 🎯 Easiest to do business with ✅ Easiest to use This is a shoutout to all those who have believed in us and continue to shower us with their love ❤️ #adtech #G2 #customerlove

Great article from Toplyne on implementing a data lakehouse to: 🔋 Power AI/ML use cases… 🌺 …with fresh data… 🤑 …while eliminating vendor lock-in and reducing overall costs. 🕵️ Read on to learn more about Toplyne's architecture, including Apache Kafka ingestion to the lakehouse, with Dagster and Apache Spark to run feature engineering pipelines. https://lnkd.in/ggkt_i36 #onehouse #dataengineering #nolockin #ai #datalakehouse #apachehudi #opensource 

"We have now selected Apache Hudi as our choice of storage layer. Apache Hudi was originally designed by Uber to solve for streaming data ingestion, which is pretty much our use-case as well. This also justifies our choice of Hudi over Apache Iceberg and Delta Lake" Great write-up by Prabodh Agarwal, Software Engineer at Toplyne on building their lakehouse platform using Apache Hudi. 🔗 Link: https://lnkd.in/ggkt_i36 #dataengineering #softwareengineering

Toplyne predicts the LTV of your website visitors and users in real-time, based on their actions on your website and product. What does that mean for the engineering under the hood? Two things: ⚡ Toplyne has to be real-time → D2C & SaaS companies use Toplyne to act on intent derived from their first-party data (almost) immediately. Toplyne's data crunching needs to be FAST, frequent, and efficient. 🙋🏻♂️ The universe of all user actions? → That's a large volume of data. Ingesting and syncing first-party data at scale is extremely complex and has a high TCO. Follow Prabodh Agarwal on Substack as he gives you a sneak peek into how the Toplyne engineering team is building an MVP for cost-effective, real-time data streaming with reduced latency, using Apache Hudi, Apache Spark, and Kafka. https://lnkd.in/ggkt_i36

Last week, a few of us made it across the pond to Tobacco Dock for SaaStr Europa. We also hosted 40 CXOs for Fish & Ships'24 with our friends from Paddle ✨ We sailed along the Thames River while the Tower Bridge opened for our boat, twice. Magnificient. Surreal. Best Afterparty. - Some of the ways the attendees described the evening. Here's a short 📽 to support their descriptions: