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For the Branch marketing team, this last week has been about planning for Q3. Things are different this quarter.

I mean, things are different for pretty much every company in the world right now…in both good ways and bad. But for us, there has been one unequivocally good change: over the last few months, we invested in upgrading our attribution stack.

Let’s back up for just a minute.

Branch provides an attribution product, so you’d intuitively expect that our marketing team would have the whole attribution thing down. But, sadly, we’ve never had the option to really leverage our own platform (the marketing playbooks for mobile apps and enterprise B2B SaaS don’t have a whole lot in common).

Instead, we’ve been forced to rely on the B2B equivalent of a ‘traditional MMP’, and the results have always been…okay-ish. We could sense something was missing, but never quite put a finger on what.

Now that we finally have a top-notch system of our own, I can say it from first-hand experience: data like this is awesome. Like gaining a superpower.

I highly recommend it. But if you’re still on the fence, we should chat — just hit reply!

Alex Bauer

Spotlight

On Monday, the team behind Basecamp officially launched Hey. This makes them the latest in a long list of companies attempting to ‘reinvent email’. And since it’s 2020, any email platform (especially one that costs $99/year) without native mobile apps is dead on arrival.

Of course, Basecamp would prefer not to pay an ‘App Store tax’ of $33/user to Apple each year, so they allow customers to access an existing subscription on mobile, but not purchase a new one.

This approach has been the status quo for many popular apps (Netflix, Dropbox, even the main Basecamp platform) on iOS for years, and Apple occasionally makes even more substantial exceptions. But something apparently went off the rails this time: after initially approving Hey v1.0, Apple blocked the v1.0.1 bug fix. Then they doubled down by claiming the original approval was a mistake, and threatening to remove the app completely.

Given the amount of press coverage, and in the context of the two EU anti-competition probes that coincidentally launched this week, I’d be quite surprised if something doesn’t ‘magically work out’ in this case. But the underlying conflict is going to keep simmering away for as long as the App Store business model involves taking a commission.




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Allstate: Mike Antognoli

Adding Value During a Pandemic

During a time of crisis, it’s crucial for companies to focus on maintaining and driving growth. It’s, however, equally as important to continue to find ways to strategically add value to your customers.

Mike Antognoli shares with us how he’s led the mobile product team at Allstate during the pandemic, in an industry whose customers typically have more of a hands-off approach. More on that story, how the Allstate app plays into the overall company strategy, Mike’s views on how a company culture built on trust is key to innovation, and what he learned from a failed Allstate experiment with augmented reality, on this episode of How I Grew This. Listen now on Apple Podcasts Spotify, Google Podcast, Stitcher, and more.

Listen Now

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Google Podcasts | SoundCloud | Stitcher

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