Drivepoint’s 2024 Mid-Year Update: Reflections from Growth Mode

So far, the theme for 2024 has been explosive growth. We spent a TON of time in the back half of last year and in Q1 of this year adding the key features and integrations that customers were asking for. The most notable additions include: great support for NetSuite, a first-of-its-kind Amazon API integration, and an end-to-end wholesale/retailer forecasting solution that uses automated velocity and pricing data to drive projections.

With those pieces in place, growth mode has pushed us to show up more in our community and dig deeper into our network of investors and operators. We’ve shipped new products, won new clients, expanded our team, and bolstered our company balance sheet (more on that soon).

Each of these steps helps us advance our core mission at Drivepoint: Empower consumer leaders to achieve the outcomes they desire by turning finance into a competitive advantage. And while we like to think we’ve already achieved this for many of our clients, we’re constantly iterating to improve their experience and partner with even more amazing brands. 

Let’s take a tour of what 2024 looks like at the halfway point.

Customer wins: Blokes, Nguyen Coffee Supply, Wise Bar, Skout Organic, Laundry Sauce, Biom, Kanpai Foods, Beyond Better Foods, Zoyava, and more

In addition to nurturing our strong ongoing partnerships, we’ve added an impressive lineup of new logos, including Blokes, Nguyen Coffee Supply, Wise Bar, Skout Organic, Laundry Sauce, Biom, Kanpai Foods, Beyond Better Foods, and Zoyava, among others. Many of these partnerships represent a niche we’re filling in the CPG space: the ability to support omnichannel distribution.

We’re especially proud of our partnership with Nguyen Coffee. As the up-and-coming brand wanted to expand from DTC, they specifically sought us out for our wholesale capabilities. Shipping beverages is expensive, and Nguyen is eager to shift more of their business to wholesale. Now that we’ve added it to our suite of offerings, we look forward to servicing even more brands making that pivot.

As we add more brands, we learn more about our place in the industry. Every dinner, webinar, and trade show has more firmly established Drivepoint as a key player in the CPG community, and people are noticing.

Product updates: Building (not buying) better features

The Drivepoint SmartModel™ has always been at the heart of our offerings. But this year, we’ve invested in dramatically improving the quality of our web-based applications and reporting to provide even more value for customers. Whether customers want to answer quick analytics questions, pull reports, or review their plans and budgets without opening a full-fledged financial model, these improvements respond to every pain point.

The result is a reporting and analytics suite purpose-built for financially-minded consumer operators and teams. 

Want to see your P&L variances compared to your budget, your reforecast, AND last months’ data? It’s now a few clicks away. 

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Want to see how your Amazon customers are being retained, split out by subscribers and non-subscribers? Yep, we have that now. 

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Want to compare your weekly velocity for a specific SKU at Whole Foods or Target to your budget estimate? You can do that, too.

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Want to get AI-generated insights about how your margin profile has been trending over the last few months? It’s here for you.

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These are just a few examples of problems we can now solve for our customers. 

Last year, we made a conscious commitment: to build, not buy, much of our internal infrastructure. From our dashboarding to our reporting to our BI tech, all of our visible UI is made in-house. 

Why? Making everything ourselves might be more work, but it allows us to better serve our customers. Now, we can answer any customer question, no matter how granular, with a comprehensive report in just 48 hours.

This level of care and customization also means that our customers are logging into their accounts and engaging with our interface much more. We designed our platform to get founders excited about their FP&A without extra lift, and it’s actually doing that. In fact, the average number of users per company has nearly doubled since the beginning of the year.

Our vision for the rest of 2024

In the second half of 2024, we plan to keep pushing ourselves forward to become an even better partner to CPG brands.

Iterating on our wholesale integration

Whether they’re excited about our new Amazon feature or love our wholesale integration, customers tell us over and over again that these additions were their top selling points. That’s why our wholesale integration remains a top priority moving into the latter half of the year. Now that more of our customers are wholesale-first retailers, we want to show up for them.

While we’ve made huge strides in building our baseline forecasting, we know the process could still be more automated. So, we’re working on making more data sources available in real time and on ironing out new features that support sales and promotion planning. 

Better support for inventory & supply planning teams

All of our customers use their Drivepoint forecasts as a key input into their detailed supply plans and inventory purchase schedules. But we’re starting to go even deeper down that path by working with some fantastic beta customers on features that make the integration between finance and ops even tighter.

Amplifying our mission

Moving forward, we’re also investing in ways to support more brands in earlier growth stages. Even if some brands may not be ready for a full Drivepoint subscription just yet, we still want to provide them with support and guidance via benchmarking data, templates, and community events and webinars. Every brand should have a strong financial foundation from day one, and we’re happy to help make that happen for them. 

Now that growth mode has started, it won’t stop. We hope you’ll keep up with us.

Ready to see what Drivepoint can do for your finances? 

‍Book a personalized demo with our team. Or, sign up on QuickStart — so you can sync your Shopify and QuickBooks data in 5 minutes to be up and running with a full strategic financial model in less than 24 hours.

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