Get ready for an origin story of a couple of data & pricing experts who were ridiculously passionate about their jobs, but got collectively hammered down by frustration. Oh no! What happened? Well, before we dive into our tale of woe that eventually turned into an awesome company, let us tell you about our founders first.
Competify’s three musketeers go by the name of Marijn Buizer, Bas Swierstra and Martijn Veldman. Marijn is our pricing expert with over a decade and a half of experience in commercial performance. Bas has an equally long track record in portfolio management, while Martijn brings 10+ years experience in data science, data engineering and data analytics.
Throughout our careers, we excelled at portfolio management, pricing and commercial performance in highly competitive industries. We loved it and fearlessly took daily decisions with a massive impact on sales, revenue and margin. Since the stakes were so high, we based these decisions on a lot of input. Think company strategy, internal commercial performance and financial data, combined with customer research and pricing & portfolio data of - you guessed it - the competition.
Ok, sure. Internal data was often well-structured and readily available. Plus, we were lucky to be able to hire a few awesome agencies that handled customer research. But now this -> obtaining insight into the pricing and portfolio of the competition? What a challenge. No, wait. A nightmare. It often involved visiting websites, ecommerce channels and marketplaces to manually collect data.
Yes, we remained valiant. But we also proved to be no match for this time-consuming, outdated, boring and error-prone process. Even attempts to build scrapers with internal teams proved to be unreliable and difficult to maintain. This is when we decided to solve the problem for ourselves.
We began by creating scrapers that collected valuable data from popular & competitive websites and marketplaces. Martijn applied his data science expertise to enrich and normalize this data, ensuring compatibility with our internal data model. He also arranged weekly data warehouse updates, enabling plug & play experience of competitive data in our daily decision making. From that moment onwards – our lives changed. Not only did we have instant access to up-to-date pricing and portfolio insights from our competitors, we could also link it to our own performance data. Eureka! From then on, we were able to:
And then we figured “we can’t be the only ones going through this”. After experiencing how it changed our lives and helped us to improve commercial performance – we were convinced that we were in a unique position to help our fellow commercial professionals benefit from the same possibilities. Competify was born.
Oh, and don’t just take our word for it. A study by McKinsey found that data-driven companies outperform their competitors by up to 20%. Clients like Bol.com, T-Mobile, and Louwman Group have already experienced the benefits of Competify's competitive intelligence.
So if you’re a pricing manager, revenue manager, commercial performance manager or proposition/product marketing manager, surrender your frustration and let us automate the entire process for you. Same goes for marketing managers, ecommerce managers, category managers, portfolio managers, growth managers, sales managers and market intelligence managers. We exist purely to save you the time-consuming inefficiency that we’ve had to deal with for years.
By providing plug & play market and competitive intelligence, Competify gives you the one tool you need to truly make a difference. It’s time to drive more sales, achieve higher revenue and up your margins. It’s time to outsmart and outperform your competition.
Want to know how we work?
We build and maintain custom webscrapers that turn any website into structured data and insights.
