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Our Story

Wicked Reports was born out of the frustration of a successful small business
owner, Mark Murrell, who wasted $4,000 on Facebook advertising.

4 years later, that same business has grossed over $2 million indirectly attributed
sales from Facebook ads and Google PPC.

“Facebook doesn’t work
for lobster.”

Hi. I’m Scott Desgrosseilliers (pronounced “de-gross-el-lee-yay) and this is the story of how Wicked Reports was born.

In February 2014, my friend Mark Murrell, founder & CEO of GetMaineLobster.com, told me “Facebook sucks for Lobster!” (spoiler alert : it was actually amazing, he just had bad data!) He had just tested Facebook advertising for his $2 million e-commerce business selling delicious fresh lobster from Maine. “What do you mean it sucks?” I asked. “I paid four grand, got a lot of clicks, but made only one sale. I lost my shirt!” he replied.

scott-headshot

“I’m shocked you found even one person to buy from a random lobster guy out of the blue. Why not get them on your email list first and then close them after they’ve gotten to know you?”

Then Mark asked me, “But even if they bought from an email, how would I know if the Facebook ad worked or not?”

That one question spawned what is now Wicked Reports.

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“There’s got to be something out there! Let me look around,” I told him, fully expecting to send him a link in 5 minutes. But 5 minutes of Googling turned into a week of searching fruitlessly for something that his online lobster store could use. I had turned up empty. A week later, I had cobbled and duct taped together an insanely complex process, that if followed completely, would yield a pivot table that showed the lifetime value and ROI for all of his Facebook campaign leads.

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I presented it to Mark and he lost his mind in bliss. I showed my pivot table to a friend at the e-commerce giant Infusionsoft, and he gave me the green light to present it to their Mastermind webinar of 50 leading consultants to their small business CRM customers.

People couldn’t believe what I was doing and they began emailing me with strong interest. I emailed out proposals offering to recreate Mark’s ROI pivot tables for $5,000-$10,000. In two weeks, I had made $20,000. It hit me that I might have a real business on my hands!

At that time, I was moving my family from Chicago to Boston and I was bored with my day job as Database Administrator for Apartments.com. It was challenging to get it all to work. I remember one night, we went out with friends, had a few drinks, and I went to bed around 1:00 am. But all night I dreamed of database code. I woke up at 5:00 am and ran to my computer to capture it. My wife woke up a little later that morning and could not believe I was up working on a Saturday! That morning I had written the first successful database code that combined all the different data sources into one cohesive view of marketing ROI. I named the file “holy-grail.sql.”

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It took me six months to work out the kinks on those initial first clients. I was then laid off from Apartments.com and given and a severance package that would last until April 2015. It just so happened that my severance ran out the same month as Infusionsoft’s annual conference, ICON. Rather than look for a new job that I would inevitably get bored with, I had a friend set up a website under the name Wicked Reports, bought 4 t-shirts with the logo he created, and flew out to ICON.

I walked up to booths and sniffed around to see who possibly was already tracking ROI for Infusionsoft customers. Just like my fruitless Google search for GetMaineLobster.com one year prior, I came up empty in my search. I saw Digital Marketer, the biggest information marketer in the space, at a booth. I asked them, “How can you tell which email you sent made me money?” and they said they had no idea which email made them the $, but they definitely wanted to talk to me if I could tell them that. Digital Marketer soon became our 10th customer and their buy-in was a big reason for our early success.

Existing reporting tools like Facebook and Google simply don’t tell you the whole story–they only give you their piece of the puzzle, and ignore the rest of a customer’s journey, which leaves businesses with incomplete data. How can you effectively grow your business like that? Therefore, we built Wicked Reports to service this growing small business need.

If you run a SMB e-commerce business, you’re likely kept up at night by one thing: How do I grow my business faster?

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It’s not as simple as “run more ads, make more money.” Customers don’t buy from brands they don’t already know, and the less known you are, the longer it takes to make a sale. Existing analytics show pie charts that leave people clueless about how to grow their business. The world doesn’t need more pie charts.

At Wicked Reports, we invented a patent-pending technology called People-Based Tracking that automatically connects and translates marketing and sales data into ROI. We’re now developing an AI-powered platform that gives marketers a predictable revenue growth system. Our bot advises them on who to target, what to advertise, and when to offer it. We make it possible and profitable to understand and act on your data. Think of the Microsoft Word paperclip, but one that tells you how to make money.

We launched as a SaaS reporting platform and have built a reputation here. We’ve proven out of the gate that this is a pain felt by many, and Wicked Reports is the right product-market fit. In 2016, we grossed $550k in revenue, and in 2017 grew over 100%–billing $1.2 million in Annual Recurring Revenue, with over 375 customers across the globe. This was with only 9,000 leads, 1 full-time salesperson, and no marketing department.

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Our technology is second to none, and we are protected from copycats with patents pending in various technologies and protocols for internet marketing ROI. We are an official Facebook AdTech and offline conversion marketing partner.

In our research, we found there are 3 new truths to e-commerce marketing

  • New leads take time to buy
  • Old leads react much differently than new leads to various marketing efforts (because of branding familiarity)
  • Different customers have wildly different values

And just one year after attending Infusionsoft ICON with 4 t-shirts and a pivot table, we were named Infusionsoft finalist for App of the Year in 2016, and again in 2017.

My background has always been data, going all the way back to when I was 10 years old. My dad would sneak me into the tracks so I could test out horse-racing systems. I spent my 8th grade vacation in Florida reading The Professional Handicappers Guide To Horse Racing. It wasn’t the gambling I cared about, it was having theories and building systems to test those theories that I loved. As I got older, I thought I wanted to be Bud Fox from the movie Wall Street. When I dug further I realized I really wanted to be a trader–again, because I love data.

At 24 years old I became a trader, and in 1997 decided to day trade on my own. It was here where I realized making the systems was more fun than waiting for the time to trade them. I got bored with trading and next took a job at Motorola where I was to build a database that could tell them what everyone is doing for work. They loved it, and they hired me and immediately started flying me around the world to install it onsite everywhere.

Which brings me to why I’m so driven to make Wicked Reports successful. This isn’t just a company—this is the next evolution in a history of building data systems and putting them to work.

Our goal is to level the playing field for e-commerce for small businesses in the wake of the oncoming data-driven, A.I. world of commerce.

Small business owners will not get left behind!