Drivepoint EOY Update: A Look Back at 2023 (and a Sneak Peek at the AI-Driven Finance Future)

At Drivepoint, we're all about helping consumer brand teams grow their businesses more profitably with world-class financial planning and analysis tools. Our customers trust us to help them scale as intelligently and efficiently as possible, and we’re proud to be such a core part of their growth journeys.

That's why we're always searching for new ways to deliver value above and beyond what an internal strategic finance team could offer, at a fraction of the cost. Looking back on 2023, we think we accomplished that—from building new tools to forecast and optimize omnichannel growth to supporting ever more data integrations that modern consumer brands demand.

Here’s what excited us in 2023 and the progress we're looking forward to in the new year.

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📈 Drivepoint Customers Grew Revenue and Increased Profitability in 2023

Our mission at Drivepoint is to help founders and management teams achieve the outcomes they desire. The most important numbers for our team are the numbers our customers put up. Looking back on 2023, our group of customers posted some impressive results.

As a whole, Drivepoint customers:

• Increased Net Revenue by 30%‍

• Increased Gross Profit by 51%‍

The median Drivepoint customer increased Contribution Profit by 3 full percentage points, and Net Income margin by more than 4 full percentage points.

In total, our customers added more than $120 million in gross profit through November 2023.

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🏆 Delivering for our Customers: BCFM Wins and Annual Planning

In the second half of the year alone, we’ve partnered with some incredible brands to maximize the impact of Q4 and set the stage for their growth in 2024. Here’s how:

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Acing the Black Friday Rush

In the “race to the bottom” surrounding many brands’ Black Friday / Cyber Monday strategies, most businesses opt for deep discounts without really considering what returning customers want. Leading up to (and throughout) Q4, we worked with a bunch of customers to dial in their discounting strategies during the most important sales season of the year.

Our philosophy is that your BCFM discounts should be a bit higher than your normal promos, but you don't necessarily need to offer discounts across the board to yield outsized gross profit. By analyzing what incentivizes loyal customers to keep coming back, our brands captured more sales from their returning customer base. A number of customers saw their biggest BFCM ever—all backed by more accurate financial forecasting and more data-informed sales strategies.

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Marketing Planning for 2024

We've also been working with brands to understand what their annual budgeting and planning, especially around marketing, should look like going into next year. A big thing on our customers’ minds is the net present value and LTV ceilings of their own customers. They want to be able to model scenarios for uncapped growth driven by ad spend.

For brand operators that want to take a more disciplined look at their growth trajectory, we’re looking at their customer retention predictions for better ROAS. For example, if a customer wanted to hit $1.4M in revenue each month for a year, we could tell them what their optimal level of spend is on retargeting ads. With that information, they could spend less on customer acquisition as long as they’re willing to cap their top line.

Uncovering this type of insight through Drivepoint’s technology and the partnerships between our analyst team and our customers has been truly rewarding.

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💪 Company Growth: Leveling Up Our Customer Experience

As we celebrate our wins with our long-standing customers, we’re also excited about some of the newer additions to the Drivepoint community, including brands like Graza, immi, Arber, Curology, VKTRY Gear, NoonBrew, Create, Mosh, and SEEQ.
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On top of customer growth, our internal team has grown considerably since the summer in order to continually improve our client experience. We're now 16 employees strong, and we’re hiring.

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🧭️ The 2024 Roadmap: All In on Amazon, Wholesale and Strategic Finance AI

We’ve always supported FP&A insights for omnichannel brands, but we’ve improved our data integrations—from NetSuite to Amazon—to the level where our platform can deliver immediate value for brands that don’t have a DTC channel at all. With that in mind, here are just a couple highlights of the road ahead for Drivepoint in 2024.

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1. Prime time for our Amazon integration

We recently launched some major enhancements to our Amazon integration. This will help us better serve our customers who sell on Amazon and provide opportunities for new brands that are entirely Amazon-focused.

Our returning customer prediction engine for DTC sales on Shopify is now just as powerful for sales on Amazon as well. With the new customer cohorts brands are building now in Q4, our enhanced predictive engine will be a gamechanger for cohort modeling insights on Amazon throughout 2024. And we’re just getting started.

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2. Wholesale data, at your fingertips

For many consumer and CPG brands, getting into retail accounts like Walmart, Target or others is a key to success in 2024. We’re stepping up our game in this area big time, with several integrations in progress to help customers forecast store- and product-level velocities to help them get the most from their wholesale channel in 2024.

If you’re thinking about expanding your channel mix, or already selling into wholesale but manually wrangling sales reports from your distribution channels into spreadsheets, you’re going to love what we’re building for you.

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3. FP&A insights, powered by AI

Imagine being able to ask Drivepoint questions like:

• How did my performance compare to my planned budget last month?
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• What caused these changes?
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• What are my latest returning customer, AOV, and subscription segment numbers?
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• What were my repeat customer numbers last month?
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The upcoming AI analyst built into Drivepoint answers those questions instantly, so you don't have to dig into your model or build a custom report. The result? You can extract financial learnings faster and spend more time running your business—with the right data-driven guidance at your fingertips.

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4. Native reporting for all the data you need at a glance

We're also building out our end-to-end financial reporting suite so you can handle more of your reporting without needing another tool or building your own BI stack. We’ll start with the finance function and then expand into other areas most critical for scaling a profitable consumer business. Eventually, you’ll have a consistent reporting standard across every metric for your company.

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🚀 The road ahead in 2024

Our team is energized by the success we’ve achieved alongside our customers this year, and we are more excited than ever about all the progress to come.

If you think there’s an opportunity for your team to level up decision making around budgeting, capital allocation, and profitability next year, send me a note. Let’s work together to make 2024 your best growth year yet.

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Austin Gardner-Smith‍

CEO & Co-founder, Drivepoint

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