The Challenge
Data is a key competitive differentiator for Castor. The company relied on superior data analytics to outperform legacy banks and other fintechs. Castor needed to model, with industry-leading precision, metrics such as CAC and consumer behavior on a daily basis to overmatch the competition.
Castor’s also had to deliver these metrics to its geographically diverse team. These metrics, and the dashboards they formed, were essential for day-to-day decision-making in departments across the company.
But here was the problem: before Coefficient, Castor manually exported tables from the company’s MySQL database and uploaded all the data into Google Sheets through copy-paste.
This led to a number of issues:
- Manual inefficiencies – Manual data exports from MySQL into Google Sheets ate up hours of time each week across multiple teams.
- Outdated dashboards – Teams did not have access to real-time dashboards and made decisions based on old metrics.
- Limited data access – Various teams did not have the permissions or skills they needed to access data for key decisions.
Castor needed a solution that could deliver the right metrics at the right time to any team member right for critical decision-making. The company debated about a way forward, until they discovered Coefficient through a Google search. Coefficient offered the middle ground: real-time analytics and dashboards, but through the flexible spreadsheet interface that everyone in the company could use, not a complicated BI tool.
“We debated our options,” said Castor CEO Diego Villarreal. “Do we hire, develop in house, buy or something in-between? But when we found Coefficient, everything clicked. Coefficient met our needs without an expensive suite of BI software. So it was an easy choice.”
Diego Villarreal
CEO & Cofounder at Castor
So Castor turned to Coefficient.
The Solution
The first thing Castor noticed about Coefficient was its seamless onboarding process. Castor was up-and-running with Coefficient not in days, hours, or even minutes, but in seconds.
The Castor team connected MySQL to Google Sheets in one click. Castor started seeing the impact immediately.
“The other solutions we looked at required more complicated integrations and on-boarding processes,” said Diego. “A few minutes after setting up Coefficient, I had queries running on Sheets.”
Coefficient’s intuitive data inline previewer allowed any team in the company to pull data into Sheets with a point-and-click interface. Non-technical teams, such as marketing, could suddenly import data from MySQL tables directly into Google Sheets without running SQL queries.
Teams once locked out of the company database could now pull MySQL data straight into their Google spreadsheets.
“Coefficient gave everyone in Castor access to a ton of data for lots of different purposes,” said Diego. “The app made our teams more effective, efficient, and agile with its ease of use.”
Coefficient’s automatic data updates empowered Castor teams to create real-time dashboards in Google Sheets. Automatic data updates, set on an hourly, daily, or weekly cadence, imported fresh data from MySQL into Google Sheets automatically. The laborious tasks of manually exporting MySQL tables into Google Sheets on a daily basis disappeared.
Now teams only had to build dashboards, reports, and metrics once. The automatic updates fed fresh data directly into all the Google Sheets assets Castor built. This allowed any team to share Google Sheets dashboards and metrics that were always up-to-date.
And just like that, the various teams in the company were off to the races with their own unique use cases. Teams throughout the company developed live dashboards based on their expert domain knowledge to enhance decision-making across every part of the business.
“Coefficient allowed almost everyone in our company to create live dashboards using their domain-specific knowledge,” said Diego. “Our teams created an avalanche of new Sheets, dashboards, and metrics. Now data is firmly embedded in all our key decision-making processes.”
As a consumer fintech focused on unit economics, Castor used Coefficient to track everything from repayment behavior to credit models. Specific use cases across the company included:
- Marketing – Tracked acquisition funnels, including CAC, across channels
- Payment – Monitored consumer payments, payment behavior, and defaults
- Underwriting Team – Made underwriting decisions based on real-time customer data
These best-in-class analytics allowed Castor to outmaneuver legacy banking institutions and rival fintechs.
The Result
Castor came to Coefficient with a simple problem: to eliminate the manual process of extracting data from MySQL tables and importing it into Google Sheets. Coefficient solved this initial problem in a few seconds with a one-click connector, but the impact continues to last until this day.
With Coefficient, teams across Castor can now access real-time data from the comfort of their spreadsheets, the interface they feel most comfortable in. All teams can leverage their domain-specific knowledge to create live dashboards and metrics to insert data-driven decision-making into any business process.
This, in turn, allows Castor to operate with a leaner, more efficient infrastructure in a highly competitive and data-saturated market. And Castor still finds opportunities for growth on a daily basis.
“Every day, we find new ways to create new dashboards,” said Diego. “With Coefficient as a foundation, we’re continuously iterating our analytics, building novel dashboards that allow us to be both agile and data-driven.”
