Wynk Music, one of India's largest mobile entertainment platforms, faced a significant challenge during the COVID-19 pandemic. The music industry was experiencing a halt in new music releases, leading to a supply problem. This situation resulted in a considerable amount of dormant behavior among Wynk's customers. The company needed to find a way to re-engage these dormant users and maintain its position in the market. The challenge was not only to identify these inactive users but also to understand their music preferences to provide personalized recommendations.

Welocalize, a global translation and localization company, was facing a significant challenge in managing its client portal. The company supports and manages the globalization programs of numerous leading brands, providing a range of services including localization, digital marketing, patent translation, and AI-enabled services. This vast array of services led to a complex web of multiple users, logins, and entry points, which was not sustainable. The company's client portal housed several workstreams serving multiple stakeholders within one organization, containing sensitive and confidential data that needed stringent protection from both internal and external security breaches. The main targets of cybercriminals, usernames, and passwords, posed a significant threat to information security. While the portal required complex security measures, including granular security clearances for each user, Welocalize needed to avoid creating a frustrating and unnecessarily complex user experience.

Finastra, one of the world's top three FinTech companies, faced significant challenges in securing its APIs. APIs form the core of Finastra's service, connecting banks with FinTech services. However, API security has become increasingly complex over the years, with attacks on the rise and traditional application security tools failing to provide adequate protection. The company's API traffic grew by 51%, while malicious traffic increased by 211%. Attackers have realized that APIs are now used for more business-critical services and share an increasing amount of sensitive data, leading to a heightened focus on exploiting APIs for attacks. Finastra faced internal and regulatory pressures to secure its APIs. The company needed a solution that could prevent account takeovers, identify abnormal behavior, and differentiate between 'normal' abnormal (e.g., a changed API) and malicious traffic.

Cardone Ventures was facing a number of challenges that were affecting their return on investment (ROI) and overall efficiency. The sales team was spending an excessive amount of time pursuing unqualified leads, which diverted their focus from motivated prospects. This not only wasted valuable resources but also reduced the potential for successful conversions. Additionally, the company lacked 24/7 coverage for inbound leads. This meant that any leads that came in during off hours were not contacted until business hours resumed, leading to potential missed opportunities. Furthermore, the company was struggling with slow lead response times. With leads coming in around the clock, it was not feasible to drop everything to respond immediately, leading to delays and potential loss of interest from the leads.

Centriq Training, a leading institution in advancing IT careers under the Tek Ladder brand, was facing a significant challenge. Despite their top-tier status, they were struggling to reach out to live leads and aged inquiries due to a lack of staff and time. The inability to promptly respond to and qualify leads was a significant hurdle in their growth strategy. The situation was further complicated by the need to re-engage past student inquiries and schedule appointments for prospective students. The challenge was not only to manage the current live leads but also to rekindle interest among past inquiries and ensure a smooth appointment scheduling process.

Pepperdine University, a leading institution for higher education, was facing challenges in effectively managing long-term follow-ups and setting appointments with prospective students. The university's staff was struggling to engage with prospective graduate student inquiries in a timely and efficient manner. This was particularly problematic for the Graduate Schools of Psychology & Education admissions team, who were tasked with nurturing and qualifying these leads. The lack of prompt engagement was leading to a lower response rate from prospective student inquiries, which in turn was affecting the university's ability to meet with more prospective students and increase their student intake.

Brainly, a leading global learning platform, faced a challenge with their machine learning-powered feature, Snap to Solve. The feature allows users to upload a photo of a problem, which the system then detects and provides solutions for. The Visual Search team, responsible for the Visual Content Extraction (VICE) system of Snap to Solve, used Amazon SageMaker to run their computing workloads and serve their models. However, as the number of training runs on their large compute architectures increased, they found that their logs from Amazon SageMaker needed to be trackable and manageable to avoid workflow bottlenecks. They needed a tool that could scale regardless of the experiment volume. While they tried using SageMaker Experiments for tracking, they found the tracking UX and Python client unsatisfactory.

Theta Tech AI, a company that builds customized artificial intelligence algorithms and front-end user interfaces for large-scale healthcare AI systems, faced several challenges in developing generalizable medical AI systems. The team had to manage thousands of experiments for large-scale parallel training workflows, which were run on GPU servers in AWS. However, they found that AWS CloudWatch Logs, their initial choice for monitoring the jobs, was inadequate for managing experiment logs. The team was unable to get experiment-relevant metrics from AWS CloudWatch Logs, debug problems with training jobs and experiments, integrate Optuna for hyperparameter optimization, and communicate the results of ML models to clients effectively.

Audiobooks.com, a leading audiobook publishing company, faced a significant challenge in improving the Cost-per-Circulation (CPC) for digital content and audiobook titles on their platform. The company aimed to predict customer churn using AI to drive more value for their clients and solidify their bottom line. As a subscription-based business, customer retention was crucial for Audiobooks.com. The company operates in a competitive market where customers can easily switch to alternative providers. Any negative experience could prompt a customer to abandon the brand, resulting in a loss of revenue, affecting customer lifetime value (LTV), and increasing the cost of acquiring new customers. The company's goal was to minimize the churn rate to lower CPC, which is calculated as the total cost of their licensing fees vs. the total number of book checkouts. High customer churn negatively impacts book checkouts and makes it difficult for distributors to get government funding. The executive team set a bold goal to track the habits of problem users and proactively make personalized offers to minimize attrition by predicting churn while increasing checkouts.

Dynamo Software Inc., a leading cloud provider of alternative investment management software, was seeking to enhance its document classification platform through AI and automation. The platform was designed to store, classify, and transfer information and metadata from various documents to appropriate investments. However, Dynamo wanted to improve the accuracy of document classification and gain the ability to make predictions based on a document's content. The goal was to reduce the amount of repetitive manual work performed by their data team, lower operational costs, increase performance, and minimize the time needed for making decisions on client investment portfolios. The existing platform received thousands of various types of documents every month, some of which were manually added by managers. Dynamo wanted to significantly improve the accuracy of their existing ML tool, automate a portion of the data processing pipeline, and achieve at least 85% accuracy on new data.

Marmon Holdings, a global industrial organization with over 100 autonomous manufacturing and service businesses, was facing a challenge in optimizing its manufacturing appliances at the McKenzie Valve Plant. The company sought to integrate a Computer Vision (CV) solution to analyze and enhance the use of its machines. The primary goal was to gain more visibility into the run versus idle time of the machines, thereby eliminating production bottlenecks and improving return on investment (ROI). The challenge was to achieve this while ensuring low implementation costs.

BetterMe, a leading behavioral healthcare app publisher, faced a significant challenge during the pandemic. Despite being well-positioned to capitalize on the shift from gyms and group fitness classes to home workouts, the company found itself in catch-up mode. The behavioral changes of its users, such as the marked increase in time users were spending on the app, required rapid adaptation. The main challenges were the speed of experimenting and responding to user needs while maintaining a high satisfaction level. The company needed to balance velocity and satisfaction levels, which was a complex task. Additionally, BetterMe needed to understand how its new features were affecting user retention and revenue rates, and which releases were gaining traction and which were not.

TripActions, a corporate travel management organization, faced a significant challenge in enabling secure banking transactions without the need for third-party services. The company aimed to accept customer payments directly, track all banking transactions processed through the platform, and securely collect and store critical and client-sensitive data. To achieve these objectives and spur revenue growth by attracting new enterprise clients, TripActions needed to migrate its platform to a secure PCI-DSS-compliant infrastructure. However, the existing infrastructure had several network, user access, monitoring, alerting, and CI/CD issues that needed to be addressed. The company approached Provectus to upgrade their infrastructure as part of their preparation for PCI-DSS compliance certification.

Blue Corona, a digital marketing agency based in Maryland, was facing a significant challenge with their citation building process. The agency, which specializes in helping home service companies improve their marketing performance and ROI, was using a popular citation provider to provide clients with consistent NAP data. This was particularly important as their clients were local businesses needing to attract local customers. However, the cost of the citation service was prohibitively high. The high price point meant that Blue Corona was not consistently able to offer all their clients citation building services. This was in direct conflict with their goal of reducing marketing costs for their clients. The team at Blue Corona was therefore in search of a cheaper, yet equally effective alternative.

Blue Corona, a digital marketing agency based in Maryland, specializes in helping home service companies improve their marketing performance and ROI. A significant part of their strategy involves providing clients with consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone number) data, which is crucial for local businesses to attract local customers. They were using a popular citation provider for this purpose, which was effective but came with a significant cost issue. The team needed to migrate 155 locations from their existing citation tool, but they were concerned about the time it would take and the security of their client’s information.

Pain-Free Dental Marketing, a specialist dental marketing agency, was facing the challenge of creating custom, data-driven marketing strategies quickly for their clients. The agency's philosophy is to handle all marketing aspects for dental practices, allowing dentists to focus on their core business and patient care. However, they found that every dental office and practice location was unique, requiring a unique marketing plan. Initially, they used Google Analytics as their primary data source, but they encountered issues with tracking specific search terms and translating their performance into actionable steps in the marketing plan. They tried other tools like SEMrush and Moz to fill the gaps, but these were time-consuming and costly.

ChargeHub, a service that helps drivers locate over 120,000 public EV charging points across North America, faced a significant challenge in maintaining its always-on platform. The company aggregates real-time data from third-party providers and its community of drivers, which it then makes available to drivers through its mobile and web apps. ChargeHub's API is also featured in mapping products, in-car entertainment systems, and elsewhere. The company recently launched ChargeHub Passport, an app that allows drivers to use multiple charging networks. With thousands of consumers relying on ChargeHub and strict SLAs governing API availability to partners, there was no room for downtime or inaccurate data. The challenge for ChargeHub's agile engineering teams was to maintain high-quality standards without compromising productivity. They identified handover between teams as a particularly risky moment in their development lifecycle, with ad hoc methods of teaching and learning APIs damaging both productivity and code quality.

Launchpad LA, one of the world’s top startup accelerators, was facing a significant challenge in managing their applicant tracking process. Initially, they relied on a spreadsheet to track their applicants, which proved to be inefficient and cumbersome, especially with non-numeric data filling the spreadsheet's rows and columns. The problem was exacerbated when the number of applicants increased to over 1,000 per class. The selection committee had to sift through more than 300 rows in a Google Spreadsheet to pare the pool down to eight startups. The process was not scalable and became 'very ugly, very quickly', according to Kyle Taylor, Launchpad’s former director of operations. The existing software solutions were targeted at large businesses with large budgets, which was not suitable for Launchpad LA. They needed a cost-effective solution that could handle a high volume of applications and streamline their review process.

BarkBox, a subscription service for dog treats, toys, and gifts, faced several operational challenges. The company, which also runs a charitable donations program, was struggling with the volume of donation requests from dog-related events and organizations across the United States and Canada. Each request had to be vetted and approved, a process that was causing a bottleneck. Additionally, managing in-office dog time, training requests, and remote work requests was proving to be a logistical challenge. The company needed to find a way to automate these processes without taking resources away from the development team.

Cottage, a San Francisco-based startup, is redefining the process of design, permitting, and construction in residential projects, particularly accessory dwelling units (ADUs). The company's unique approach involves handling the entire development process, from initial design to acquiring planning permissions, and through to construction. However, coordinating this multi-stage process with various stakeholders, including designers and general contractors, posed a significant challenge. The company needed to remain lean and agile, which required efficient tools to manage the process. Additionally, Cottage faced the challenge of integrating various tools used by different teams, such as sales and marketing, with industry-specific software used for site feasibility, design, and construction coordination. The company needed a solution that would allow them to collect and manage data from these disparate tools without overburdening their tech development resources.

Designation, a UX/UI designer bootcamp based in Chicago, was facing a challenge in managing their admissions process. With a small team of less than 10 full-time staff, every person was vital to the day-to-day operations. The admissions team, which initially consisted of only one person, had to contact and schedule interviews with each applicant to qualify them for the bootcamp. This process was time-consuming and inefficient, especially when dealing with unqualified leads. The challenge was to find a way to automate the process, pre-qualify leads, and make the operations more efficient, even in the absence of the team.

Caren Kelleher, a music enthusiast and former Google employee, identified a significant gap in the music industry. She noticed a high demand for vinyl records, particularly from independent artists, but a lack of capacity in factories worldwide to meet this demand. This challenge was compounded by the difficulty of getting the records pressed and into the hands of fans. Caren founded Gold Rush Vinyl, a high-quality record-pressing company, to address this issue. However, she faced another challenge: scaling the business on a budget. She knew that automation would be key to achieving this, but struggled to find a solution that was flexible enough to fit her team's unique needs.

La De Da! is a gift store in suburban Chicago known for its personalized customer service. The owner, Jill Carlisle, is renowned for her ability to recommend the perfect gift for customers. However, with the advent of social distancing measures, the store was forced to close, posing a significant challenge to its business model which relied heavily on face-to-face interactions. The store's website was basic, with no eCommerce functionality, as Jill had always preferred to sell in-person. The challenge was to create an 'eCommerce-light' solution that was easy to manage and could replicate the in-person customer experience that La De Da! was known for.

Digital marketing firms are often faced with the challenge of managing new leads efficiently. The traditional method involves manually checking Facebook Lead Ads every hour or two, or exporting a list of new leads at the end of each day for follow-up. This process is not only monotonous but also time-consuming, leading to delays between a lead entering their information and the firm's response. The firms also have to monitor mentions of their brand on social media and across the internet, which is a full-time job in itself. Keeping an eye on competitors adds to the workload, making it almost impossible to track new mentions without missing some. The firms needed a solution that would automate their lead workflow, eliminating the need for manual work and ensuring quick response to new leads.

At the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, Rhiannon Menn, a concerned citizen, was looking for ways to support struggling families in her community while adhering to stay-at-home orders. She started by making and delivering meals to families in need, a gesture that quickly gained traction and evolved into a national grassroots movement known as Lasagna Love. The initiative grew organically, attracting over 2,000 volunteers across the country within a few months. However, the rapid growth presented a challenge. Rhiannon was manually onboarding new volunteers, a process that involved sending out links and welcome emails, and entering information into their database. This manual process was time-consuming and inefficient, hindering the initiative's ability to scale and reach more families in need.

obo. Agency, an account-based marketing firm, was facing a significant challenge in managing and navigating through APIs of custom software used by their clients. The team was tasked with improving marketing automation, optimizing sales processes, and driving engagement through content and design. This required them to work with these APIs and connect them to other tools. However, the APIs were often disorganized and poorly documented, making the task time-consuming and complex. Business Solutions Analyst, Doug Puccetti, spent a significant portion of his day sifting through these APIs, strategizing how to extract data from a client's API and send it to new, efficient systems. Additionally, the manual migration of data when changing systems was a tedious task that consumed a lot of time and often had to be restarted from scratch if there was an issue with the upload.

Meny Hoffman, the host of 'Let's Talk Business' podcast and CEO of Ptex Group, was facing a significant challenge in managing the podcast alongside his other responsibilities. The podcast, which features interviews with business owners and thought leaders, required a considerable amount of time and effort to manage, particularly in the onboarding process for the more than 70 guests featured. The process involved multiple steps, including sending emails to guests, preparing interview assets and questions, and maintaining records. Without automation, managing these tasks was overwhelming and time-consuming, making it nearly impossible to launch the podcast.

Poka, a manufacturing tech company, was facing challenges in maintaining SOC 2 compliance and other security workflows. The company's information security, risks, and compliance analyst, Mathieu Marcotte, was tasked with finding a system that would minimize risk and human error while ensuring their records were always up-to-date. The software solutions they found were either outdated, too expensive, or not agile enough for their startup. They needed a system that would support their information security and compliance processes, and provide the flexibility to create their own SOC 2 controls that exactly fit their needs.

Marjolein, a financial blogger based in the Netherlands, was struggling to manage her full-time job and her side hustle of blogging about her financial journey. She was spending a significant amount of time promoting her work on social media, which was not only time-consuming but also a task she did not particularly enjoy. She wanted to focus more on content creation rather than promotion. Additionally, she was looking for an efficient way to grow her audience and reach her financial goals, which included retiring early. The challenge was to find a solution that could automate her marketing efforts, save time, and help her grow her blog audience.

RoverPass, a platform that simplifies the search and reservation process for campers and RVers, was facing a significant challenge in keeping their team informed. With over 20,000 campsites and RV parks listed on their platform, tracking all the activities such as bookings, cancellations, and payments manually was proving to be a daunting task. The team had to deal with a multitude of tasks including notifying sales reps of new opportunities, handling failed payments, and communicating with partners. The process was not only time-consuming but also prone to errors and inefficiencies. The challenge was to create an efficient workflow that would automate the notification process and keep the team updated in real-time.