Kdan Mobile builds a data culture to drive business growth

Kdan Mobile Software Ltd. is a global SaaS provider led by Kenny Su, a software engineer and the company’s founder and CEO. The company launched in 2009 with a PDF reader and now has a growing portfolio of cross-platform productivity and creativity solutions, including its e-signature service DottedSign, PDF and File Management Solution Document 365, and Creativity 365, a creative suite for designers and content creators. The company is currently expanding its portfolio into areas like Document AI following the completion of a successful Series B fundraising round totaling $16M USD.

Tableau has supported the success of Kdan Mobile by helping the company build a data culture. The visual analytics platform enables employees at all levels within Kdan Mobile to make data-driven decisions and has had a positive impact on the company’s bottom line. Results to date include a 50% improvement in return on ad spend (ROAS) for user acquisition and an 80% reduction in hours spent on weekly and monthly reporting.

Getting started with data analytics

Kdan Mobile’s Tableau-supported data journey began in 2019 when it decided to rebuild and expand its internal data team. Data Analyst Pei-Hsuan Hsia was one of those hired and joined with existing knowledge and experience with Tableau gained while in graduate school. So, when Kdan Mobile decided it needed a data analytics platform, Hsia recommended Tableau.

“Tableau offers a really powerful way to explore and present data and with all of the resources available online, I was able to learn how to use it on my own,” said Hsia.

Ease of use and availability of training factored into Kdan Mobile’s decision to use Tableau, but equally important was Tableau’s flexibility. With data held in several databases, both cloud-based and local, the company needed a solution that could integrate with and combine multiple sources of information.

Kdan Mobile brought in a consultant to work alongside its backend engineer and data team to set up Tableau Server and establish an internal dashboard for analytics of their various products across platforms. The company had previously used an external solution to monitor the performance of its iOS and Android apps. With Tableau, Kdan Mobile was able to manage these analytics internally and extend monitoring to its Windows apps.

The project was completed within a quarter, helping to increase the data team’s confidence in Tableau and leading to new use cases.

Increasing business value

Kdan Mobile used Tableau to create a Finance and Fundraising Index to prepare for its Series B fundraising round. The dashboards supported the finance team in preparing data on product lines and global revenue, including breakdown of different revenue streams. The use of Tableau also improved the way data was evaluated, helping to ensure compliance through the permission-based access features.

Today, Tableau is used across Kdan Mobile's entire business and supports the objectives and key results (OKR) methodology it uses to set and monitor goals. For example, Kdan Mobile has a dashboard in Tableau that’s continually refreshed with information like daily revenue and daily advertising costs. The dashboard acts as the company’s kanban board, helping everyone visualize progress and identify any gaps that might impact the ability to meet their goals.

Tableau has also helped Kdan Mobile optimize its user acquisition funnel and monetization model. In the past, team members would gather for three-hour meetings on a monthly basis to review this model and find opportunities to increase ROI. The meetings entailed taking data monitored by three different laptops and writing the numbers on the wall for discussion. Due to the complexity and time commitment, it was only possible to have those meetings on a monthly basis, limiting the opportunities for product and business leaders to adjust strategy. Now, through Tableau, adjustments can be made more often based on real-time data access.

Now, all of the data can be visualized in a single dashboard, helping Kdan Mobile better understand where and when to invest its budget and to capitalize on previously unseen opportunities. Analysis is 6x more efficient and has led to a 50% increase in ROAS.

Embedding a data-driven mindset

Kdan Mobile’s use of Tableau has grown quickly in the past two years with almost every team now leveraging dashboards to make key decisions. For example, product teams have a feature usage dashboard that helps them decide which features to focus on or replace. Marketing and business development teams have dashboards that monitor stats like sign-ups and provide insights on how to best design and adjust promotional strategies.

Adoption has been supported and encouraged through the promotion of online learning and peer-to-peer sharing. For example, every Friday there’s a session where people can come together to discuss data-related topics and share best practices.

I-Hsiu Tseng, Data Analytics Manager at Kdan Mobile, shared that there has been a real culture change within the company as people become more comfortable and confident in exploring their own data.

“We see a data-driven mindset being essential for every organization in the near future and we’ve achieved that at Kdan Mobile where everyone could be considered to be part of our expanded data team,” said Tseng. “Many of those employees used to wait in line for us to create dashboards. Now they can access and explore data on their own and come to us for discussion. It has reduced time spent performing manual and complicated calculations and improved communication and collaboration.”

The insights and efficiency provided by Tableau also support Kdan Mobile’s global expansion where it has a whole new set of challenges and metrics to track. “Without Tableau, we might need to hire five times as many people. However, the transparency and insights it provides helps us with a number of activities, from product development to setting smart campaign strategies,” said US-based VP of Marketing & Strategy Wei-Chung Wang.