MyCamper starts data-driven journey with Fivetran

“We have top-notch infrastructure that allows us to capture all the data points and know that we can easily scale in the future. Of the four parts of our data stack, Fivetran is the central piece that makes everything work effortlessly.”
— Alexander Flach, Finance, People & Data Manager at MyCamper

When Michele Matt, founder at MyCamper, grew frustrated at having his campervan unused in the driveway for 90% of the year, he realised he had stumbled on a business idea. In 2015, he became founder and CEO of a Swiss start-up. MyCamper quickly became the Airbnb of a campervan/RV community made up of vehicle owners and holidaymakers looking to rent.  

The Challenge: Making data a priority    

MyCamper knew from the start that data collected on its web platform would be important, but early attempts at analytics were confined to a lot of days spent manually extracting data from Excel spreadsheets which was not only tedious but time consuming. Using Google Analytics was easier but limited in scope. With more pressing priorities that occupied an early stage start-up and a lack of in-house skills to manually build out data pipelines, a gap in data analytics needed to be filled.

Only when MyCamper engaged with BI Concepts did a plan start to take shape. In the first phase of what would be a transformational journey, the Swiss-based analytics boutique introduced a process whereby data from the company’s transactional database went directly into Tableau, the BI tool chosen to visualise the most important KPI (Key Performance Indicators), such as bookings and financial indicators.

The problem was that it was difficult to historicise data in a way that could be retrieved for analysis. MyCamper was still unable to track specific data sets, compare historical data to present, or even have a comparable baseline. Moving to the modern data stack would complete the transition of having very limited data to having a quick analysis on their business.

The Solution: Building a best-of-breed platform

BI Concepts introduced the idea of a modernized analytics cloud platform that could ingest data from multiple sources into a centralised data warehouse to perform analytics on top. BI Concepts first brought Tableau on board to surface insights. Next, the team introduced Snowflake as a cloud data warehouse. This allowed for a central repository where data could be transformed using Fivetran Transformations and prepared for reporting. Fivetran was the final piece in a best-of-breed jig-saw, used to manage data delivery from source to destination, ensuring MyCampers data is always accurate and up to date in Snowflake.

Ease of use was important to MyCamper because the team wanted to avoid hiring internally and wanted to outsource the work of getting data into their warehouse.

Without Fivetran we would have needed a data engineer to set up all the ingestion streams, so it really helped us tremendously, said Alexander Flach, Finance, People & Data Manager. Basically, it’s a plug-and-play solution for keeping all the connectors up to date, as opposed to having to hire a dedicated team to take care of them.

Features like Fivetran Transformations made light work of a complicated process, providing an instant snapshot of the camper owner database to know what campers were available for rent on their site and which campers were booked. This type of snapshot was critical for the product's success. Schema drift handling also helped, with new objects automatically added to the warehouse without manual intervention.

Data is sourced primarily from MySQL, MyCamper’s transactional database and Salesforce which holds customer information. The next phase is to analyse additional accounting data, using Fivetran to connect sources to their data warehouse to answer questions pertaining to Financial Analytics. Self-service analytics are also in the roadmap, enabling different business users to go into Tableau dashboards and create their own visualisations around the metrics that matter most to them.

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The Results: Insights today and scale for the future

Today, the MyCamper web platform lists 2,000 campers. The state-of-the-art data platform has enabled a small start-up to grow its customer base quickly by maximising resources and saving 10+ hours per week.

"By not having to do everything manually, we have saved weeks and we can see where we stand immediately."
— Stefan Lieberherr, Co-Founder and Chief Marketing Officer at MyCamper

The big win has been faster access to data around target customer groups. A capacity dashboard, for example, shows the status of the rental fleet. Historically, it provides a useful indicator of the best times for hiring out campers, something that owners had no visibility of before. It means they can better plan when to use the vehicle themselves, and when it’s most profitable to make it available on MyCamper.

The data team can now run SQL queries and create reports with insights that were previously unavailable or too time-consuming to compile.

"We have a top-notch infrastructure that allows us to capture all the data points and know that we can easily scale in the future. Of the four parts of our data stack, Fivetran is the central piece that makes everything work effortlessly on the connection side so that data engineers don’t need to waste time fixing broken pipelines."
— Alexander Flach, Finance, People & Data Manager at MyCamper

Flach has no doubt that Fivetran was the right investment at the right time and praised the company for its support throughout:

"If we didn't have Fivetran we would have needed to hire data engineers, so it’s definitely been worth it, and I know I speak for BI Concepts when I say we appreciate the timely help we have received from the Fivetran support team. We appreciate the help and quick response times to fixing critical issues."
— Alexander Flach, Finance, People & Data Manager at MyCamper

If you want to learn how a modern data stack can enable your company to produce strong insights and save money, start your 14-day free trial today.

About Fivetran:

Fivetran, the leader in automated data integration, delivers ready-to-use connectors that automatically adapt as schemas and APIs change, ensuring consistent, reliable access to data. Fivetran improves the accuracy of data-driven decisions by continuously synchronizing data from source applications to any destination, allowing analysts to work with the freshest possible data. To accelerate analytics, Fivetran automates in-warehouse transformations and programmatically manages ready-to-query schemas. Fivetran is headquartered in Oakland, California, with offices around the globe. For more information, visit fivetran.com.

About BI Concepts:

BI Concepts is a young, creative and reliable team with the drive to make your business thrive. As an end-to-end provider of business intelligence platforms we leverage a portfolio of best-of-breed technologies. We help companies to bring all of their data together, clean it up and handle this valuable resource. Customers will be able to focus on their core business and even gain more & better insight in one go.

We are dedicated to automating and simplifying your work processes as much as possible. With Fivetran as the first choice data ingestion provider we are pioneering as their first Swiss partner and are happy to be part of their amazing journey.

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