How GrowByData moved from e-commerce data to AI search visibility
Prasanna Dhungel, co-founder and managing partner of GrowByData, explains how the company grew from serving small to mid-sized e-commerce businesses to providing marketing intelligence across Google, AI search and the digital shelf. The conversation covers winning early customers through an agency partnership, diversifying sales channels and understanding customer needs before building.
Focus first on a customer problem people will pay to solve, and avoid depending on a single source of sales and marketing. GrowByData’s experience also shows why products and customer focus need to evolve as the market changes.
What’s the short story of how your business started, and what makes it genuinely different from the other options your customers have?
I had a thesis on how data should be used to drive business impact using a concept I developed called the data value chain. We implemented this to start GrowByData to bring this capability to serve small to mid sized businesses in eCommerce. Today, we’ve evolved to offer visibility insights from Google and AI Search to help brands understand how visible they are vs competition, and how they are priced.
How did you win your first customers, and where does most of your new business come from today?
Our first customers came through an ecommerce agency we partnered with. Our philosophy has always been serve our clients well. We’ve continued to evolve our products and services to add client value as the technology, data and competitive landscape has evolved. Over the last few years, we provide brand visibility insights from Google and pricing intelligence. We’ve added AI Search insights into the mix. Today, our new business comes from new brands that want to maximize their visibility on Google and AI Search.
What’s one decision that changed the direction of your business, and one mistake that taught you the most?
Diversifying to add new clients and evolve our product has changed the direction of our business. Had we remained totally focused on our early customers and our early products, our company would have died. A mistake that I made was rely on sales and marketing on a single source. While that has its merits in the beginning, diversifying sources of marketing and sales so you don’t put all your eggs in one basket is key.
What has changed in your industry or in what your customers expect over the last couple of years, and how have you adapted?
We’ve provided holistic brand visibility metrics on Google to help brands understand how they are visible across earned and paid media channels. AI LLMs have added a new horizon on Search with consumers searching on ChatGPT, Google AI Mode, Claude, Perplexity and more. This has been the big change. Today, we provide visibility on Google and across AI Surfaces to help brands understand whether and how their brand is visible and perceived across these surfaces.
If you were advising someone starting out in your industry today, what would you tell them to do first, and what would you tell them to ignore?
I’m an engineer and have gotten excited about building new products.
Today, I’d suggest someone starting out to focus on talking to customers and selling the concept before spending too much time building the product. Product features and technology will change. However, if you understand customer pains that they will pay for, you have found a monetizable need. I’d focus on finding that.
Thank you to Prasanna Dhungel and the team at GrowByData for sharing what actually worked with Leaders Perception readers.
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