On August 18, Danielle and I announced Firstparty to the world. What we didn’t talk about was where Firstparty came from and why it exists.
The roles of Marketers and Developers are colliding
Marketers are working with their Engineering counterparts more than ever, especially as new tools become increasingly complex. Through these partnerships marketers are now de-facto engineers themselves, using complex logic to build automations, understanding what cookies and HTTP requests are, and learning how to write SQL and Javascript.
Engineering has learned from this partnership that Marketing has budget for tools and an insatiable appetite for data. Marketing’s analytics and measurement tools give Engineering insights into where customers are coming from and what they are doing. As Marketing’s tool kit expands, Engineering can focus more on the core product and less on commoditized features.
We are marketing and software development experts who have been solving this problem for over 10 years
Firstparty comes from years of wearing both of those hats – growing businesses as digital marketers and building products as engineers and company operators. We witnessed the consequences of adding tool after tool on top of poor measurement strategies, overpriced software, and fragmented data. We felt the pain of integrating marketing tools inside of custom software and processes.
We also learned that these issues helped form a new partnership between Marketing and Engineering.
We’re building Firstparty with an aim to provide huge value to both Marketing and Engineering by embracing the partnership and acknowledging the new skill sets that marketers and engineers have acquired.
We are building an alternative to Google Analytics that enables companies to store their own data
Firstparty makes it easy to collect accurate marketing analytics and get that data where it needs to be – next to all the other data your business is generating.
Data warehouses are becoming the single source of truth in organizations from startups to the largest enterprises. Combined data in a warehouse provides rich context about the customer journey to teams that are not only marketing to the customer, but also building for the customer.
This intersection of Marketing and Engineering is a convergence that we believe is unlikely to slow, and we are super excited to build solutions that support these teams as they work closer than ever!