Noibu’s next chapter: Ecommerce analytics + monitoring (with Kailin Noivo)

[00:00:00] Kailin Noivo: We are committed in being the single tool that all you folks listening to will use to collaborate across teams to drive conversion and decrease time spent. And really, what that means is anything from technical to marketing, to analytics, to customer experience in UI/UX, all of that.

[00:00:23] Kailin Noivo: Hey folks. Welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Toolbox Expert’s perspective. This is going to be a unique episode, so this episode is going to be just me. And you're probably wondering why. And it's not because we couldn't source a guest in time. Actually, we're pretty backlogged right now. It's more because we wanna talk to you all about something really, really interesting.

[00:00:45] Kailin Noivo: So, Noibu, as you know it is not the same Noibu that we are going to be. So, what really, that means is most of you out there think of us as an error monitoring solution, right? So, most of you, customers or prospects, are like, hey, it's kind of the checkout guys, right? Maybe there's bugs in my checkout, conversion revenue checkout. We were the innovators of that space. We built the category.

[00:01:12] Kailin Noivo: And I'll take you guys, a bit down memory lane, if you're curious. The original problem that we discovered in 2019 was ecommerce teams, especially those with development agencies, had very little visibility in a way that they understood into technical issues impacting their conversion.

[00:01:32] Kailin Noivo: And how did we know this? Well, we knew this because if you catch the ecom manager on the wrong day, they'll talk to you about how they spent their morning chasing some bug that customer service told them was on the website. So, we really began an extreme focus on identifying and quantifying revenue impact storefront issues.

[00:01:52] Kailin Noivo: Anything from checkout to your website, add to cart button, or anything in that realm? The goal is very simple. We wanted teams to not lose any revenue due to negative technical experiences. So, that was our point solution, and that worked really well for a long time. So, that was our tremendous growth, was built on the back of that through the kind of COVID era, and the point solution was the right move at that point.

[00:02:20] Kailin Noivo: And why was that? Well, because a lot of digital teams were getting way more budget than they'd ever seen before. So, they were focusing on best-of-breed solutions, and that's what you guys wanted. So, we talked to our customer, and all they really wanted was better and more accurate prioritization and more errors.

[00:02:37] Kailin Noivo: So, that was the lifeline of our business for years, and that's what our customers loved, and we're happy with. Obviously, a lot's changed since COVID and a lot's changed in the last couple of years, and it's not just about side errors. A lot of our customers are under financial pressure to consolidate tools.

[00:02:55] Kailin Noivo: Also, the landscape has changed. A lot of tools are building different features that are all starting to look the same. And at the end of the day, our customers were starting to tell us in late 2022, really in 2023, and definitely in 2024, that errors were not enough. It was not enough to justify a solution, and they actually were really happy with it, but they wanted more from us.

[00:03:19] Kailin Noivo: They wanted digital experience, they wanted heat mapping, they wanted scroll mapping, click mapping, journeys, analytics. So, that kind of sent us down the path of investigating what this actually meant, right? So, it took us a little while to fully research, but we came to the conclusion that monitoring alone isn't enough.

[00:03:39] Kailin Noivo: Obviously, we spent a lot of our R&D efforts completing the monitoring capabilities in the last couple of years. So, with our release of performance, so core vitals, we also built in some logging, and we built that all under the Noibu kind of guidelines, which is like, hey, what is it? I need to understand it in clear English.

[00:03:59] Kailin Noivo: What's the impact? What do I do to actually rectify it? And really, really in 2024, and definitely in 2025, we realized that going from error monitoring to a monitoring solution wasn't the end of what our customers wanted. So, you guys wanted more, we delivered more.

[00:04:15] Kailin Noivo: But it turns out, at the end of the day, really what the market was demanding was an all-in-one solution that carries together multiple categories, and those categories stem from monitoring, which is front-end monitoring, logging performance to heat mapping, custom journeys, heat maps, analytics, end-to-end journeys, and then finally analytics.

[00:04:38] Kailin Noivo: And where we are on our journey now is taking what we learned and our principles from what we had initially built in error monitoring. We applied it to monitoring, now applied it to digital experience, and now we're going down the path of applying it to analytics, all under building a single tool for all the different personas on your team, from merchandising to UX, to ecom, to technical, to customer service and VOC.

[00:05:09] Kailin Noivo: We want all of these people working out of a single pane of glass because that is what we are consistently hearing from our executive contacts to decrease the total cost of ownership of running ecom while increasing alignment and actual results on the team. And I'm gonna talk a bit deeper as to what that means, but from a high level, the market pulled us from error monitoring to monitoring, and now it is pulling us into what we're calling ecommerce analytics and monitoring, which is the amalgamation of the three categories that I just mentioned.

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[00:05:57] Kailin Noivo: It's the same principles as when we went from error monitoring to monitoring. Fragmentation was hurting teams. Some people were using an APM to look at logs. Other people were using a specialized tool to look at core web vitals. Some people were looking at session replay in a different tool.

[00:06:13] Kailin Noivo: And it was really, really hard to triangulate on what the most important thing was at any given time for the business and have a single source of truth where you weren't looking at conflicting data. And what I mean by that is, hey, if your conversion tanks right, well, you have different areas that you could look.

[00:06:33] Kailin Noivo: You could look on the technical side for errors, you could look at performance, you could look at ads, you could look at your analytics, you could look at your heat maps, and you're often flipping between different tools that don't really integrate or understand what the other one is seeing. And they work if it's a silver bullet. And what I mean by that is if your conversion drops and it's because an error got released, or if it's because your website went from 2 to 4 seconds, like that's very clear.

[00:07:01] Kailin Noivo: But in my experience and what our customers were telling us is, the answers are often a lot more nuanced than that. And it's not, like you're not gonna find a single bullet, like a single magic bullet. And maybe you will, time to time, but in aggregate, you will not. And we saw the consolidation. Engineering teams and product teams started to get consolidated.

[00:07:20] Kailin Noivo: UX sometimes goes into products, sometimes into marketing, and we started seeing the evolution of the CDTO, right, or the CDO. And the CDO owns marketing and technology, especially in mid-market brands that are platformed. So, we saw that shift teams were getting leaner, teams were getting consolidated, and how they worked was changing.

[00:07:45] Kailin Noivo: The days of having an engineering team work out of an APM, your customer service team working out of a session replay tool, having your VOC team working out of a tool that may also have session replay, but just collect surveys, having a performance team looking at specialized performance tooling, and then having digital experience teams looking at heat apps and all these tools are different.

[00:08:09] Kailin Noivo: Those days are done in my opinion, and what our customers are craving, especially the ones in our ICP, is they want a single tool to work seamlessly on their platform, and they want it spread across multiple teams. From engineering, to product, to marketing, to customer service, to their agency, and they want everybody singing from the song sheet.

[00:08:35] Kailin Noivo: And the reason for that is because attention and prioritization matter, and really getting signal from these tools is important, and it's hard when they're missing context from other tools. And this starts to compound more and more when we talk a bit about AI.

[00:08:53] Kailin Noivo: I'll talk a bit about where we think AI is going and where we intend on playing in that market, but I wanna make sure this is super clear. Noibu, as an air monitoring company, is dead. It's gone. It's never coming back. It's a part of our history. It's a part of my history and a big part of my life that we are moving on from. And we're not abandoning investing in that. We still think it's super critical. It's the base of the pyramid, but it's not the full pyramid.

[00:09:22] Kailin Noivo: And what that means is that we are committed in being the single tool that all you folks listening to will use to collaborate across teams to drive conversion and decrease time spent, and really, what that means is anything from technical to marketing, to analytics, to customer experience in UI/UX, all of that.

[00:09:45] Kailin Noivo: And I know what some of you guys are thinking, like, hey, can't be everything to everyone. And I agree. And all of our competitors are horizontal, which means they have a lot of different features. But what's really nice about commerce is we focus on a single persona and not a single persona within a commerce team, but a single persona in the context of commerce.

[00:10:05] Kailin Noivo: So, we spend a lot of time with commerce teams, omnichannel, D2C teams. We understand what keeps you up at night. And we know that you don't want a tool with a thousand features; you want to solve your problems, drive revenue, and decrease costs. What's good for us and bad for our competition is that we're not everything to everyone.

[00:10:27] Kailin Noivo: We are built purposely for commerce, we will continue to be purposely built for commerce, and we think in the age of AI that this is actually gonna be more important. Let's be clear. What's everyone striving towards? Everyone's striving towards some sort of ChatGPT-ask interface where you can effectively co-work and collaborate on marketing strategies or understand why your performance is up or down. Like, all of that is, is super clear.

[00:10:52] Kailin Noivo: I don't think that's revolutionary to anyone, and I don't genuinely believe that's gonna be solved horizontally. And I think it's really hard when you're attention-splitting, and mainly because it's really, it's a data problem, everyone's using the same foundational models.

[00:11:08] Kailin Noivo: That’s not a big surprise, and people are fine-tuning them; that's fine. But really, the value is in the data structure, the integrations, the workflows, and that's where we're super committed, and that's why we think we have the right to win, and that's why we think we are winning. Like I mentioned before, I wanna be very clear that we are abandoning the error standalone solution, and we are heavily committed into owning the complete analytic stack from digital experience, to errors, to performance, to analytics as a whole.

[00:11:38] Kailin Noivo: And we are very excited. We have our AI products coming out in Q1 of this year. I mean, we have some, but we're doing a big, big, big release, and our roadmap this year is heavily focused on that. So, if you're an ecom merchant that's listening, whether you're a Noibu customer or not, take a look at our product.

[00:11:55] Kailin Noivo: We're not talking about things that are in the roadmap and years away. A lot of what I'm talking about is already in the product being used and getting some great adoption. And I wanted to have this conversation really to say to the market, we're here, we're very serious, we're winning, we're gonna continue winning, and we are going to own this space.

[00:12:15] Kailin Noivo: And we will be, by far, the best solution for this space. And we can see in commerce, when the category is big enough, vertical solutions always win. When you look at email marketing, when you look at reviews, you can name the one to two players, and those players are only in commerce. There's a reason why Klaviyo, Beto, MailChimp, and we plan to take advantage of the same synergies. It's where we are putting our time, focus, and attention.

[00:12:44] Kailin Noivo: And if you're in commerce, then you need to know our name, and you need to understand that if you are going to use our software. You will not only decrease your licensing costs because you don't have to pay for session replay on your APM and then session replay on your digital experience tool.

[00:13:00] Kailin Noivo: You don't have to have heated conversations. Maybe this will be heated, but for different reasons. Between product engineering, you don't need to negotiate. You don't need to build manual business cases. Everything will just be there and it'll just work. And that's where I think commerce, people that have leaned into that strategy are winning.

[00:13:19] Kailin Noivo: And the ones that aren't are now starting to realize that that is the winning strategy, and yeah, that's it. I really want it to be super clear to you folks that we're here to win. If you're in commerce and you either use an analytics platform, a digital experience, or an APM, or any monitoring tool, all of them or any of them, you should definitely check us out.

[00:13:41] Kailin Noivo: And I mean that super clearly, and genuinely that we have the best tools and we will continue to innovate, and we're super excited, and we're very grateful to have this opportunity. Always DM me on LinkedIn. I'm super active. Let me know if you guys have any questions, but I appreciate the listeners.

[00:13:59] Outro: The Ecommerce Toolbox Expert’s Perspectives is brought to you by Noibu. To find out more about Noibu and how we can help you debug your ecommerce site and rocket your revenue, visit www.noibu.com. That's n-o-i-b-u.com. And then make sure to search for The Ecommerce Toolbox Expert’s Perspectives on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or anywhere else podcasts are found, and click subscribe so you don't miss out on any feature episodes. On behalf of the team here at Noibu, thanks for listening.