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The flagship software platform of healthfinch, a Madison-based startup, is represented by a light blue bird named “Charlie.” Health care systems hire Charlie to process routine prescription renewals and delegate tasks to give physicians and nurses more time for other work.
healthfinch helps its customers streamline inefficient workflows. So when Jonathan Broad, healthfinch’s chief technology officer, noticed that one of the company’s own processes was unnecessarily time-consuming, he knew it needed to change. healthfinch employees were pulling data on Charlie’s productivity, visualizing it in Excel and sending the files to customers, one at a time.
Broad found the solution in another Madison startup, Beekeeper Data. Founded in 2014 by Matthew Rathbone, Beekeeper helps companies email automated, customized reports to customers and other users.
“They’ve been able to take what we were doing manually and automate it, and do it in a much more elegant, streamlined fashion,” says Karen Hitchcock, healthfinch’s chief experience officer. “What we do for our customer for the clinical workflow, they’re doing for us for the analytic workflow.”
Beekeeper has hired three employees and grown revenue by 25% since announcing $550,000 more funding last fall.
In the midst of this growth, Rathbone, the CEO, moved to Dallas earlier this year. “My wife got a job in Dallas, so I moved out here,” he says. While his wife’s new position as an assistant professor sent the family south, Rathbone says Beekeeper will maintain its Madison headquarters. “Our software engineering center is really Madison, and we plan to keep it that way.”
Just two of the company’s six employees, the lead software developer and a part-time marketing associate, are based in Madison. A new sales associate started last week — in Dallas. But Rathbone says the company will “definitely in the next 12 months” hire another employee in Madison and hopefully several more in the future.
He’s careful to find people who aren’t fazed by rapid change. “We’ve found that when you talk to people who aren’t into startups, when you start telling them about the risks, their eyes kind of go wide,” he says. “It’s like they’ve never really thought about it before.”
Rathbone appreciates Madison’s startup community. “I still feel a part of it even though I’m now in Dallas,” he says. healthfinch is one of four Beekeeper customers in town. The others are apartment-hunting site ABODO, food-ordering app EatStreet and SOLOMO Technology, which tracks business analytics.
Joe Barneson, SOLOMO’s head of product development, says Beekeeper’s product has increased the productivity of the company’s eight data scientists by 50% and decreased the length of time it takes to provide analytics to customers from three weeks to three days.
These days, Rathbone is focused on planning product development and sales strategy. Beekeeper’s goal for the year is bold: become the premier embedded analytics company on the market.
“If you’re a software product, embedded analytics means you’re displaying metrics and analytics for your customers inside your product,” Rathbone says. “We want to be the platform that can power that kind of capability. We are already doing that to an extent.”
Most companies are doing some type of reporting, Rathbone says, but doing it in a way that is not easy to replicate each week or month.
When he began working with healthfinch, Rathbone spent time in the office speaking to healthfinch employees to learn what its customers needed in the reports. As a result, Hitchcock says, healthfinch’s clients now receive richer metrics that can be used for hiring decisions and strategic planning.
“There’s so much data in our world right now,” says Hitchcock. “We don’t have a lack of it. What we have a lack of is organizing it in a meaningful way.”