WhatsBusy Brings Data To Brick-And-Mortars

By Ben Carsley

“Why guess?”

That’s the tagline behind The Woodlands, Texas-based WhatsBusy: a startup focused on letting consumers and businesses make smarter decisions with their ultimate form of currency: time.

Using transactional data from clients, weather, event and traffic data – and data from outside sources – WhatsBusy claims to “create transparency so you can empower your decisions.”

Want to know the best time to show up at the airport? WhatsBusy can help. Want to know how to attract shoppers to your business? WhatsBusy can lend a hand their, too.

So what are the commercial implications for WhatsBusy, and how does the company see itself operating within loyalty and payments? PYMNTS.com spoke with Jordan Thaeler, president and co-founder at WhatsBusy, to find out.

PYMNTS.com: This is the first time we’ve covered WhatsBusy on the site, so give us a brief breakdown of who you are and what you’re aiming to do.

Jordan Thaeler: WhatsBusy is a big data startup from San Francisco, though we moved to Texas a few years ago. We take lots and lots of data to predict foot traffic at brick-and-mortar-type establishments.

We then share this data with the public so they can discover what places will be like before they get there. Our goal is to use our data savvy to save people time. You can get a digital map to a location, or grab an online customer review, but nobody can tell you what the experience will be like when you get there. We think that’s immensely important to our decision making, and we should have those options available.

How is a company like WhatsBusy relevant to the payments world?

Because we have access to really good data, and very accurate algorithms, we’re able to make amazing sales forecasts for businesses. Businesses use this information to better understand customer demand and how they should plan things like labor, inventory and promotions to match these customer demand patterns.

Over time, we envision understanding what drives customer behavior and will start using data to attract customers during slack times. These types of data models fall under the realm of revenue management, and have been employed by the hotel and airline industries for decades. Attracting customers will require discounts or incentives, and this falls directly into the world of payments, where processing the customers will take place.

Data is a sensitive subject, but let’s talk about what WhatsBusy uses to generate its reports. I understand you use both your client’s data and outside data to create forecasts. Talk a little bit about how that works.

Our clients maintain a history of transactional data on their registers. We integrate with this data and mesh it up with things like weather data, event data, traffic data and scores of other outside factors that tell us what influences their customer turnout. No business is the same so the algorithms and data we employ is likewise custom for each client.

Historically this would have been an impossible feat, but with machine learning algorithms computers can do all the heavy lifting for us in a fraction of the time. For obvious reasons we never share our clients’ sales data with outside parties. If we did we would be in the same prison cell as Martha Stewart!

I know that you’re doing a lot of cool things with Airports and DMV offices – places we typically associate with long wait times – but let’s focus on retail and commerce for a second. How could WhatsBusy help a merchant make more sales?

We think it’s critical that retailers understand that increasing sales does not necessarily mean your business is more financially solvent. We saw a fad a few years ago with large discounters (e.g. Groupon and LivingSocial) that offered products to increase sales. Unfortunately a lot of retailers were burned on these services because they were not implemented correctly. While sales might have nominally increased in volume, the incremental cost to support these sales far outweighed the assumed profit increase associated with the uptick in sales volume. So, what you had was a fixed cost to produce a product or service but a dive in revenues on each sale. This killed the bottom line and forced a lot of retailers into bankruptcy.

We believe that data should be the foundation for decision-making. Sure, you could fly a plane across the ocean with no data instrumentation, but how did that turn out for Amelia Earhart? Instead of providing your product or service to customers for free, what if you could target customers when you needed them using very specific offers? Using data you can determine what types of promotions work, what customers are most receptive to such promotions, and when to run the promotions to increase your bottom line. Don’t discount your entire menu by 75 percent for several months, but use data to discount high margin products for short periods of time – say 2 p.m. to 4 p.m. on a Wednesday. Put these offers in front of consumers where you have data that lets you know they are likely to change their purchasing patterns and you have a justifiable marketing decision.

Let’s touch on the consumer side briefly – how can the average person use WhatsBusy today, and how do you envision that changing in the future?

Right now the consumer tool is about discovery. You should use the tool to discover when places will be busy and use that information to drive when and where you do things. Over time, we will close the loop, and be able to book reservations or make sales on the platform. These activities go hand-in-hand with the processing industry.

Obviously the services you provide lend themselves to some sort of loyalty or deals offerings in the future. Is that something WhatsBusy has lined up down the road, or is it too early for that question?

Loyalty is an incredibly fragmented market in everything except grocery. I don’t think we would get involved in that space just due to the cost of distribution. It’s outside our core focus and something that we don’t have on our roadmap. So we’ve thought about it, but not for us as this time.