Maxio customer PredictHQ has made a business out of helping to cure your business’ FoMO and in doing so, has provided a growth lever for many of their customers.

More specifically, PredictHQ is a global events intelligence platform that aggregates, enriches, and connects data for local and global events to help you predict which events could impact your business.

What to do with all that data? The possibilities are endless!

For instance, a hotel chain is able to see what events have impacted their various locations around the world potentially causing their bookings to be higher than normal, including the average lead time for when customers start to book relevant to particular events. This type of event intelligence allows for far more effective promotional and pricing management.

PredictHQ also provides real time data to inform businesses about unscheduled events such as natural disasters.

The company was incubated within Online Republic, a global company that specializes in car and RV rentals, and cruise travel reservations. Initially the focus was how specific events impacted their own business performance, but they soon realized the robust event data could help other businesses and PredictHQ was born.

From the beginning they’ve been solving real world problems, which has allowed the company to refine their products based on real world feedback and results versus theories.

Getting Started with a Subscription Model

Currently PredictHQ offers two products, both of which are available on fixed recurring price plans (billed monthly or annually) after a free trial period.

• Web app – The SaaS platform targets marketers and revenue managers who are looking for a ‘turn key’ and collaborative platform that helps them to predict which events impact their business the most.
• API – One single API to access multiple enriched data streams. This targets software engineers and product managers by simplifying the development of features and products based on global event data and the event intelligence algorithms which are baked into it.

“Early on in our development we were lucky enough to speak with some people that had been in the trenches of subscription model businesses.” – Campbell Brown, CEO & Co-Founder of PredictHQ.

From those conversations PredictHQ realized that as a startup, their limited resources needed to be focused on creating their own event intelligence platform. Building their own billing system would be complex and wouldn’t create directly relevant intellectual property for their business.

It was imperative PredictHQ find a recurring billing platform that was cost effective, would allow them to get started quickly, and scale easily as the business grew.

According to Campbell, Maxio not only checked off those requirements, but “being able to talk with an actual person and quick response time from Chargify’s support team were much better than other providers we were evaluating.”

SaaS Subscription Billing Streamlined

While PredictHQ opted for a more seamless integration utilizing Maxio’s API and webhooks, implementation was quick and smooth.

To ensure that their web app’s speed wasn’t compromised, they replicated the data from Maxio to their local database. When their web app needed to know something about a customer’s subscription, it checked their local database rather than Maxio directly. Although a lot of work was involved in making sure their local database was up-to-date with Maxio’s data, the process took less than a week to implement.

This was exceptionally quick compared to some other solutions during their evaluation process which stipulated to the PredictHQ team their minimum setup time for integration sat anywhere between 3 – 6 months. Being a startup with limited resources did not afford PredictHQ the luxury of time.  

“Overall the Maxio implementation went very smoothly. We found the documentation to be thorough, and being able to use a test site in Chargify made the whole process much easier.” – Robert Kern, CTO & Co-Founder of PredictHQ.

Outside of Maxio effortlessly handling PredictHQ’s sign up workflows and billing scenarios, a few features have already proven to save the marketing and sales teams a ton of time.

Campbell stated that in another startup he was involved in, the company spent months building a system to generate and track promotional codes. “With Maxio, we got that functionally straight away, which we have used to effectively bring in beta testers and early adopters.”

Being able to quickly update free trial periods on a case-by-case, as needed basis without development resources has also been a huge time saver. “This gives us both the necessary automation we require as well as the added flexibility to adjust plans for our prospective customers,” says Yen Lim, Head of Product at PredictHQ.

What’s Next?

Callaghan Innovation, a New Zealand government agency that specializes in helping New Zealand tech companies succeed globally, awarded PredictHQ additional funding to assist with further company growth.

According to Campbell, PredictHQ is embarking on an ambitious integration program which will allow customers to access event intelligence within some of their favorite platforms.

With the help of their growing global customer base, PredictHQ is also continuing to expand their “high quality global event data, enrichment and algorithm driven initiatives to take event intelligence to the next level.”

To learn more about PredictHQ visit them at www.predicthq.com.