How A Startup Uses RootNote To Validate Ad Spend

A case study on how smart watch tech company Ganace uses RootNote to validate ad spend and achieve other tasks.

The Short Of It

Invest In Content

A shift in strategy for Ganance meant investing in social media content as a means to achieving their goal — which brought about new pros and cons.

The Ease Of Your Systems Affects Your Attitude Towards Them

One of the biggest blockers when it comes to running efficient processes is an ugly workspace — whether it's your cluttered physical desk backed up against a blank wall, or an unwieldy piece of software that is counterintuitive and difficult to navigate. When you create streamlined and aesthetically pleasing systems, they're more likely to work for you.

The World Is Your Burrito

RootNote has a myriad of uses, and for startups like Ganance, being able to do multiple things throughout the platform allows them to get more done without adding more to their own creator stack. 

Investing In Content

Ganance is a company on a mission to make any watch a smart watch. Founded by entrepreneurial watch lovers, the company created the Ganance Heir, a thin device that attaches to any traditional watch in order to allow users to do things like track your health, receive notifications, and more. Ganance offers both physical hardware and software as part of its core product. 

Around Q3 of 2024, Ganance decided to put an increased emphasis on direct-to-consumer messaging, with the ultimate goal of driving more pre-sales of its flagship product, the Ganance Heir. That meant putting more effort into social media content, and particularly, advertising. 

Ganance founder and CEO Alex Ocampo had two simple questions when it came to investing more in content. "If we’re putting more into socials, how do we see if it’s working," he says. "And how can we use RootNote as a source of truth."

They started working with a company to run ads on Meta (Facebook and Instagram) with consistency for the first time. 

Prior to using RootNote, Ganance didn't have any analytics tools or solutions for social media beyond whatever the individual apps offered. "We wouldn't really know unless we opened the app," Ocampo says. "Like [Ganance Associate Director of Development] Tyler Nolan says, we were just kind of caveman banging sticks together. We were more talk than action." 

Even with just a few simple Instagram graphs, Ganance was already able to visualize their increased social reach. But that was just the tip of the iceberg.

A direct correlation between launching a content-based ad campaign and social growth, visualized for the first time.

Ganance's Focus On Direct-To-Consumer

  • The Ganance team realized that directly selling to individual consumers (versus selling to businesses) would require a more focused presence on social media, where virtually all product customers have some form of presence. 
  • The team committed to testing a modest and consistent ad spend in order to drive pre-orders and awareness of the Ganance Heir. They hired a third-party company to assist with this process, but wanted to create custom visualizations and reports to better understand the impact of these campaigns. 
  • Prior to running paid ads, most consumers only found Ganance through in-person activations or because they were "superfans" actively seeking them out.

Creating An Elegant And Inspiring System

But visualizing social growth was just the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to Dataspaces' intuitive layout and design, Ganance was able to create entire reports using a combination of third-party and first-party information. 

Ganance CEO Alex Ocampo would meet with the third-party company weekly, taking the image of their reporting and putting it into a Dataspace. He would get a text summary of that information and then place it alongside other widgets in the Dataspace to create a comprehensive, beautiful view of how their paid ad efforts were affecting their overall social media presence and waitlist signups. 

This easy and elegant report keeps everybody on the same page and is shareable among different stakeholders. Plus, it helped put the company's larger social media goals into perspective. 

"We were seeing the followers grow and seeing the waitlist grow, and we started looking at our social media at a macro level," Ocampo says. The team decided this growing presence could serve a larger purpose in the direct-to-consumer ecosystem.

"This needs to be a place where we can answer FAQ and understand at how we’re presenting ourself as a brand," Ocampo says. "We need to push out content that answers things we feel haven’t been answered well; run a weekly AMA; we have to look at our social media and ask if it’s representing us."

A clever use of mixed tech inside a Dataspace to create elegant and readable reports.

Experimenting With Other Use Cases

One of the cool things about using RootNote for your startup is that it can slot in to help with particular areas you may not have previously considered. For instance, Ganance Associate Director of Development Tyler Nolan started creating a list of potential influencers the company would want to work with. Nolan would add them as creators and connect their publicly available information in order to track them over time. The use of the All Creators Summary can help visualize this immediately. 

The thinking is — if you're interested in doing your own influencer outreach, you'll probably need to make a list of these creators at some point. Why not make it in RootNote, where you can also track their growth and tag and evaluate the different types of creators you may want to work with at different stages? Before using RootNote, it was mostly just spreadsheets — a clunky, unattractive, manual solution that most business owners are far too familiar with.

Nolan also started utilizing Dataspaces to better analyze the company's growing customer funnel. "If people aren't giving us their emails, or not converting to pre-orders, we want to know where they're falling off," Nolan says. Ultimately, the goal comes back to understanding how paid social media efforts are impacting various areas of the brand and business. 


After Using RootNote

Introducing a whole new strategy into your business can be intimidating. But Ganance approached their direct-to-consumer strategy from a place of openness and data acquisition, and it's led to growth in ways they previously hadn't experienced. 

Before using Dataspaces, Ganance was generally unaware of their social growth and not focused on their social presence. They only really knew about the metrics if they opened the app and happened to see what had changed. With a new focus on social, they immediately started employing Dataspaces to monitor growth. By incorporating outside data along with their own social, they created an easily updatable space that any stakeholders could see. 

The company also started tracking potential influencer partners, as well as experimented with funnel analysis to better understand how their focus on direct-to-consumer is working. 

When something is more fun to do, you're more likely to do it. Comparing RootNote to a platform like Google Analytics, Nolan says the nice thing about RootNote is that it's intuitive and clear on how to put it together. "RootNote is a great way to put it together," Nolan says. "It let’s me do the thing I want to do and see the thing I want to see. It’s visually appealing and easy to present. And it's really cool to segment data based on what content that data came from." 

The Bottom Line

When it comes to exploring new strategies with content, there are tons of unknowns. By partnering with an experienced third party company and utilizing Dataspaces, Ganance shows how every company needs a good ecosystem of tools and services to better understand their business. While RootNote is one tool in that toolset — one that is constantly evolving and improving — having an easy and elegant solution can make a world of difference when it comes to following through with new initiatives.