BRZE

I believe there will be many investors on this board interested to read Bert’s (Ticker Target) latest public article in which he introduces and shares his research on Braze. Braze went public in Nov and released its ER on Mon evening. The article can be found here https://seekingalpha.com/article/4476220-braze-latest-genera…
This is an exciting young company.

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Q3 looks good, they have been accelerating for 3 quarters now. But the guidance for next quarter is flat. I can’t seem to find much information about this.
I have found this in the earnings call: “Our fourth quarter revenue guidance includes appropriate risk adjustments for new business and renewals we have yet to close this quarter.”

There also seems to be some seasonality in their revenue history.
QoQ growth:
20Q2 12,2%
20Q3 9,5%
20Q4 9,2%
21Q1 11,7%
21Q2 16,5%
21Q3 14,7%

So maybe growth will stall a bit in Q4 and then pick up again in Q1 next year.
Or they could be very conservative because it’s their first guide ?(similar as AMPL).

Anybody else has a view on this?

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Hi Johshaw,
Thanks for posting the article on Braze. I took a look at YouTube videos to get a better sense of Braze’s business. The core of Braze’s business is to customize push notifications and emails based on a very granular look at a person’s behavior. In one video, Braze claimed to send music recommendations based on the type of music that a person likes at different parts of the day. They also gave examples of how push notifications of a sale on a product that a person just paid full price for was a big turn off.

I am trying to figure out if Braze is a business that I like. One thing I struggle with is more emails and push notifications. I seem to be fighting a constant battle with both, and more times than not, I delete email and spam push notifications. I may be an anomaly, but I would not like a large amount of unsolicited notifications from most services that I use, even if they might be a little helpful.

My other concern with Braze is privacy. When data is aggregated for advertisers, I think that it’s a lot easier to avoid privacy concerns, but when it AI get’s super granular with user behavior, concerns might get raised. Maybe privacy rules are a little different if a service (e.g Spotify) uses personal data to enhance their users experiences. Regardless, there’s a real fine line between being helpful and being a pest.

I’m still thinking about this. Maybe it will improve how businesses relate to their customers, but I am not super excited after my first look.

Best,

bulwnkl

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How does Braze obtain the data they feed into their AI? I’m assuming they’re getting web browsing history. Projecting out:

Apple has blocked 3rd party access to web history:
https://www.cnet.com/tech/computing/apple-updates-safari-on-…

CNBC reported that a majority of iOS users are not opting in to share their data:
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/13/apples-privacy-changes-show-…

Google will start blocking 3rd parties in 2023:
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/24/22547339/google-chrome-co…

How much web traffic doesn’t flow thru iOS and Android? The question for me: how will Braze continue feeding their AI if they’re blocked from getting data?

Joe D.

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How much web traffic doesn’t flow thru iOS and Android? The question for me: how will Braze continue feeding their AI if they’re blocked from getting data?

I don’t really know the details of what Braze does, but when it comes to things like this, I always assume if it was easy, everyone would do it themselves. Obviously they need to figure out how to make their business work, and might not share all the details on their secret sauce anyway. And if it’s really impossible, then maybe whoever does it best with what’s available will make the money. So you just have to follow whether the business is executing.

Perhaps someone with more technical knowledge can explain more. One thought is that iOS and Android can really only block apps from tracking users outside of those apps. There’s nothing to stop an app from tracking what a user does in the app itself. So if you have enough partners, you could track a user from partner to partner, making a network effect. Sure, there are ways around that (using Apple’s “hide my email” feature for instance) but again you just need someone to provide the best targeting possible.

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“There’s nothing to stop an app from tracking what a user does in the app itself.”

This, exactly. That data is gathered with the device owners’/app users’ consent and is then used to help qualify individual users for whatever messaging the app publisher wishes to send, using whichever channel the user has expressed a preference for and consented to.

A couple of important ideas here:

That data is used in real-time, which means the Braze customer doesn’t burn resources and waste time on traditional methods, which are serial processes involving large, cumbersome database queries with multiple “branches” or table joins. With large audiences, this takes a lot of time during which individual recipients or segments of recipients can fall out of the audience the sender is trying to identify.

On the Braze platform, individual recipients of the messaging qualify in and out of the intended recipient audience right up until the moment the message is actually sent.

A further benefit is that the Braze customer can be channel-agnostic. In other words, the same or similar message can be delivered via whatever channel the intended recipient seems to best prefer - be it an in-app notification, a website message box, an e-mail message, etc. - and the sender doesn’t have to necessarily know in advance what those preferences might be for a given recipient.

Last, the Braze testing module is pretty robust and allows Braze users to test with small segments of real users what kinds of content and frequency work best in a highly automated fashion, so as not to abuse what little time or attention the recipient can spare the sender, and to maximize ROI for the sender.

All of this allows the Braze user to iterate more quickly and accurately while respecting the privacy and preferences of app users. These strike me as significant advantages over legacy marketing platforms, primarily Salesforce Marketing Cloud and Adobe Campaign, the two behemoths in the space.

Current customers of the platform include some enormous names in the marketing and mobile app space:

Burger King
KFC
Walmart
HBO
Venmo/Paypal
Just Eat
Canva
Postmates
Yelp
Peacock (NBC streaming service)
DraftKings

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