Vlytics

While this blog has been fairly quite we have been working pretty hard on Vlytics.

We are in the midst of doing a complete overhaul of the entire application starting with a new and improved design. Dewey, our lead designer along with Mat our Art Director, put the finishing touches on the new look dashboard.

We are also working on a Remote Phone banking tool that is set to be released later this year – more details in future posts.

So is Vlytics 2.0 all just pretty graphics and charts? Nope, Justin and his team are working on some data enhancements and Scott is still working on Polimetric ratios (think financial analysis for political campaigns).

For those of you non-politicos you might think 2009 is hibernation period for political campaigns – wrong! There will be over 200,000 political campaigns this year and Vlytics will be active. We still maintain clients in CT and CA and working on adding clients in FL, VA, OK, TX, and MN. You might even see Vlytics partner up with some other innovative political startups in the near future.

For those of you wondering about the API, shoot us an email and let us know what you would use it for – we are looking for early adopters and innovators who need a solid data platform to jump start they’re idea.

Scott will be in New York City next week for some client meetings and if your around and want to meet up shoot him an email. Or if you want to surprise him you will probably find him at Shake Shack around 1pm on Friday.

Yesterday, almost 1 year to the day of Vlytics’ 1 year anniversay, one of our clients won a very close race in CT.  As a first time entreprenuer in the notoriously difficult tech start-up arena I feel like a rookie baseball player hitting a walk-off homerun in they’re major league debut, I am ecstatic not only for the win but for also making it this far.

Given our thirst for accurate numbers and precise data you would think I would know the exact moment at which point Vlytics became more than just an idea.  Well I don’t, it could be when I couldn’t sleep and around 7:30am on July 7, 2007 after 8 hours of writing/diagramming came up with a 24 page document that served as the foundation for the Vlytics platform and algorithms.  It could be when I took my first meeting with some politicos to get some feedback on the idea in August 2007 or maybe it was when I filed my first patent on January 24, 2008?  It could be February 23, 2008 when I almost died driving to CT to pitch my soon to be first clients.  Rather I chose March 3, 2008 as the inception of Vlytics as a company as this is when I accepted my first round of private financing and thus crossed the threshold of theory to the realm of execute or fail.  

I am happy to say that Vlytics will be around for another year and we expect growth in both our platform as well in our revenue (and yes we had some significant revenue in 2008).  I read back in July of 2007 that only 1 in 10 startups make it longer than a year – I don’t know if its true but I certainly feel like I beat the odds.  

Google Analytics tells me that if your reading this you probably have read this blog before.  Common sense tells me that if your reading this I have probably met you and told you about Vlytics, because of that I owe you thanks – thanks for listening, contributing, criticizing, and using Vlytics – without you I wouldn’t be looking back at the past year as a success.  

Since Vlytics is all about stats I figured I would give you some from the 2008 election cycle:

These are aggregate across all of Vlytics clients so as not to give away any campaign methods. 

Some campaigns knocked on a lot of doors and some didn’t.  Some sent out A LOT of email or relied on mail more than phones.  More in depth stats on what seemed to work later – we are rolling in vote histories so as to get some real in depth aggregate data so we can figure out the effectiveness of these methods – keep an eye out for that report later this spring/summer.

One thing for sure is that every single one of my clients now has the best database in they’re respective districts – the next person who runs in that district will have the benefit of knowing who turned out and who didnt and what issues motivated them and what issues didnt. The goal is to create a truly invaluable information source that gets more intelligent as the years go by – a true foundation for success now and in the future.  

Due to a few traveling mis-haps it looks as though I will be attempting to present at tommorows RNC Tech Summit.   I have put my Powerpoint Presentation below as well as the text of my speech.  

I came across this site today www.fivethirtyeight.com.

If you like statistics and you like politics than this is the site for you. If you like baseball stats and you like political stats than Nate Silver could be your messiah. In short his claim to fame was picking Obama to win in NC and Hillary’s win in IN when all the polls were showing otherwise. Not only did he pick the winners but he picked the winning margin within a point in each case. Almost anyone can pick a winner but picking the winner and the margin is reserved for the truly talented.

How does he do it? Simply put he uses math and large data sets.

Nate Silver looks at a cross section of polls, demographic data, and vote history than mashes that in with weighted averages to come up with an accurate prediction of voter turnout.

Nate takes readily available data (lots of it is free) and cuts out the clutter, refines the good data, adds in some outside indicators and uses modeling programs to predict polling outcomes. The point is that Nate can predict political elections with readily available data. That is important because that means that the answer to who is going to win an election could be floating around right now – you just need the right tool to figure it out.  Now, to be clear I am not saying that campaign managers, messaging strategies, or ground operations are not needed I am saying that a data driven look at a candidates chances of winning in the thick of the campaign can be the timely catalyst to change or tweak those strategies.  

Hello – Welcome to the Vlytics Blog!

This space will cover all things related to Vlytics plus provide tips, tricks, and the occasional insight garnered from poring over lots and lots of voter data. 

Don’t know what Vlytics is – learn more here.