TrovaTrip Builds a Modern Data Stack & Delivers Insights 95% Faster with Sigma
TrovaTrip is a group travel platform that gives Creators everything they need to plan and build trips that bring their online communities together in real life. By connecting Creators with thoughtful itineraries planned by Trip Designers, TrovaTrip takes care of the logistics so hosts can focus on building meaningful connections with their community. TrovaTrip is on a mission to make travel easier, safer, and more accessible to all.
With significant growth over the last three years, TrovaTrip has relied heavily on understanding, analyzing, and responding to a significant flow of data inputs. Serving Creators with a seamless integration with Trip Operators and Travelers (trip guests, end users) requires collecting and streamlining information across all three audiences. Teams at TrovaTrip wanted to spend less time creating and managing dashboards and more time improving the customer experience and driving the business forward with data which wasn’t possible with Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets alone.
As TrovaTrip grew, so did its need for data insights and a more sophisticated analytics platform. TrovaTrip’s data team had to build the data models and write custom SQL to get the final data products. After which, they had to check the accuracy and ensure the data they were using was valid before distributing the necessary insights to make data-driven decisions. This can be a time-intensive process, but with the right tool can be done efficiently.
“It can be incredibly complicated to calculate metrics along the sales cycle. We needed a tool that displayed the performance of sales funnels and conversion rates,” shares Jacob.
Connecting to data in desktop BI tools or Excel is memory intensive; I was always hoping my computer didn’t freeze in the process.
—Jacob Keltner, Senior Business Analyst, TrovaTrip
When TrovaTrip onboarded new sales members—which was happening more and more frequently as the company grew—it was important to create efficient ramp-up goals. By building a process and scalable system, data teams could spend more time cultivating the insights that could help the organization grow.
Jacob Keltner is in charge of all things analytics at TrovaTrip and gets data from inbound marketing and outbound sales teams. Jacob has oversight on most company metrics, including pipeline, revenue, accounting data, and more. He and his team wanted a tool that could help them build these reports more efficiently and ultimately support cross-functional teams to self-serve the critical information they needed. Additionally, TrovaTrip wanted a tool that could bring additive value to their existing resources like Posthog, Microsoft Excel, Google Analytics, and Google Sheets—allowing them to integrate and view data rather than silo it.
TrovaTrip decided to modernize its data stack to reach its new analytics goals and improve workflows across the business. The new data stack consisting of Snowflake, Fivetran, and dbt, was built from scratch. The goal was to build the best foundation in order to scale and be flexible enough for a small team to maintain. All that was left now was for TrovaTrip to find an analytics tool that could support their existing tools and make it possible to automate dashboards and enable self-service analytics for teams and business users.
TrovaTrip’s CEO, Nick Poggi, ultimately decided to implement Sigma to simplify their analytics workflow and maximize the return on investment they had made into operational tools. As TrovaTrip continues to grow, Sigma is equipped to support its scale with ease of use, collaboration, and data modeling features.
With Sigma sitting on top of that foundation, it is very quick and simple to create and deploy reports on data models in the data warehouse. When new projects call for new data source integration or new data models to be built around business logic, Sigma's GUI (graphic user interface) shows for fast data discovery, calculations, transformations, and rapid iteration.
TrovaTrip is able to onboard users in Sigma in just two weeks, 92% faster than the usual six months. With Sigma in place, business users at TrovaTrip can create unions and joins in singular tables without writing SQL. Additionally, TrovaTrip reduced report delivery time from days down to an hour in Sigma. Anything that rises to the level of department or company interest when it comes to data is now immediately started on Sigma. This means teams are able to leverage Sigma to quickly and easily build data models and accurately measure data.
Compared to other BI tools, Sigma definitely has a faster time-to-delivery and a simpler framework to use. Being web-based and low memory means all the compute is in Snowflake. Your calculations are instant and correct.
—Jacob Keltner, Senior Business Analyst, TrovaTrip
Within TrovaTrip, many teams now leverage Sigma to easily recreate and automate reports and dashboards that they manually created with SQL in the past. Jacob has been using Sigma to create vintage curves to see performance over time and compare customers to different periods going back a few months to years. This makes it easier to discover trends that showcase how TrovaTrip has become more efficient with trip planning and product improvements to serve all sides of the marketplace.
With Sigma, teams do not have to build a new data model in code inside the data warehouse before a report can be built and tested. TrovaTrip is able to see time and resource savings in development and deployment, and teams are enabled to focus on the highest-priority analytics and insights.
Today, teams at TrovaTrip look at Sigma reports to quickly and seamlessly filter and explore data to answer their own questions.
Sigma easily connects to TrovaTrip’s other tools, such as dbt, Fivetran, and CRMs. With this seamless connection, TrovaTrip is able to ingest Facebook, Instagram, and Google Analytics data for analysis and make data-driven marketing and operations decisions. For example, now TrovaTrip is able to discover their cost per conversion metric and ad spend data by campaign and timeline. With this information, TrovaTrip can see what customer lifetime revenue looks like.
It is incredibly simple and quick to identify key metrics such as sales funnel performance and conversion rates using Sigma. Because all the data is sitting live in Snowflake, TrovaTrip is able to instantly tap into it through. Once a report or dashboard is live, it will stay fresh and with the latest data no matter what, without the need to set up scheduled updates.
Jacob no longer needs to manage the dashboards or spend extra time analyzing them for other teams since they can easily drill through the data and uncover insights on their own in real-time. This led other partners to be able to answer their own questions with data and enabled the data engineers to focus on more important projects.
If it weren’t for Sigma, I would be stuck maintaining reports rather than moving on to other equally valuable projects.
—Jacob Keltner, Senior Business Analyst, TrovaTrip
Executives at TrovaTrip now leverage Sigma to conduct revenue planning and forecasting to develop business strategies based on data and measure economic and industry trends. Jacob also uses Sigma to compare how customers perform based on previous years, giving a clear picture of customer health. Having these kinds of metrics readily available allows TrovaTrip to stay competitive and focused on important projects without second-guessing the data.
As more people at TrovaTrip gain access to Sigma, data remains secure and governed in Snowflake because it never leaves the warehouse. Sigma allows for role-based permissions, meaning users only see the data they need to work with. Now, these users don’t need to go to Jacob or an analyst to ask simple questions, saving time across the business and creating a sense of ownership—everyone is equipped to answer important business questions.
TrovaTrip is able to conduct its financial planning in Sigma with no issues while scouting for the right FP&A platform or an advanced accounting software for its financial data needs. "The amount of financial planning and analysis that I can do in Sigma really alleviates the need to have a dedicated financial analysis platform,” says Jacob.
What historically took a team of five to complete can now be done with one person in Sigma. This has resulted in a more efficient analytics workflow which ultimately translates to reduced analytics-related costs and gives teams and individuals more time to work on other initiatives.TrovaTrip was able to see a 95% reduction in time to update their foreign currency liability report, down from 6 hours to 15 minutes.
Before TrovaTrip implemented Sigma, they had to manage their data pipeline closely and manually solve errors. Now that everything is connected to Snowflake and automated in Sigma, they can focus on driving the business forward with the insights from the data and prioritize improving the overall customer experience.
