- N26 uses a data warehouse with application and interaction data
- Metabase is used across the company — BizDev, Operations, Product Management, Design and other departments
- Commonly asked questions include
- “How many credit cards were reordered last month?”
- “How many accounts were opened in July?”
- “What were the top performing marketing campaigns this summer?”
Data-driven reporting on the monthly status of my objectives (combining Metabase and Google Analytics). Translation of the main pages and categories of the site into Fast-paced experimentation towards customer acquisition. A-B testing through the creation of landing pages and targeted social ads. Nov 26, 2020 Photo by Luke Chesser on Unsplash. Metabase is the best open-source BI tool. For those who are unfamiliar, Metabase is an open-source business intelligence tool with both a query builder and a native query option.
About N26
N26 is Europe’s first mobile bank. N26 went live in the beginning of 2015, and allows customers to sign up for a bank account, manage their account, transfer money, maintain investments and more all from their mobile application. Originally just a fancy front-end for Wirecard, they since raised over $50M, received a European banking license, grew to over 160 employees and have more than 200,000 customers.
Why Metabase?
Gino Cordt, previously Head of Data, and now interim-CTO of N26, had tried out a number of other tools, both open source and commercial. He and his team found other tools either too complicated, too rough around the edges or had licensing terms that inhibited company-wide usage. As part of this they had a collection of useful SQL queries, which jump-started the value they got from Metabase immediately.
They installed Metabase in 5 minutes on AWS, and were able to use it immediately within the company.
One of the core reasons for deciding to use Metabase was the ease of self-hosting. As a financial institution, N26 had significant reporting and compliance requirements. Placing all their data operations within a single regulatory regime greatly reduced uncertainty and compliance costs.
The Data
They started out with a read replica of their main application database. This allowed them to immediately create dashboards and provide ad hoc reporting support. A few months of usage later, they decided to move to a more specialized data warehouse. This includes a modified copy of their application database (data model optimized for analytics, sensitive information removed), interaction events through Snowplow and third party data like App Store reviews.
The Questions
One of the unusual aspects of N26 is the culture of data literacy they have created. Everyone uses the SQL interface of Metabase and are able to ask their own questions. This begins with a training workshop anyone in the company can take to learn SQL. As more complicated questions arise, Gino or others on his team are able to sketch out the query for less technical users. This sketched out query is then used as a template for further questions the user (or others they have given it to) are able to answer on their own. This also serves as a mechanism for detailed information about the data model to be transmitted throughout the company.
Metabase has found widespread use within N26 – their top 10 most active users include Product Managers, Designers, and Marketers.
Another feature that is extensively used at N26 are the permissions that were introduced with release 0.20. When dealing with sensitive data, it is important to be able to restrict access just to the people who really need it to do their job, not the whole company. With the addition of these access controls, even developers are switching from using a native SQL client to using Metabase.
Unexpected benefits
Every once in awhile, N26’s use of Metabase turns over an unexpected rock. One example occurred when an analyst noticed that credit card re-orders dipped for two days in a row. Further investigation discovered a bug in a recent software deployment that was quickly corrected. Without Metabase, this would have likely taken longer to discover.
Gino’s Advice for others
Having run Metabase for more than a year, Gino has some advice to other Metabase users.
Users should be careful in what they put into dashboards. It is common to write useful but non-performant queries and place them in a dashboard. While this got end users the metrics they desired in dashboards, it also resulted in complaints about performance. It is important to spend some time optimizing the calculation of metrics that occur in highly used dashboards.
Another important piece of advice Gino offered was to carefully consider how to separate out official dashboards and saved questions from those that are end-user generated. If left uncontrolled, users tend to be overwhelmed by the large number of questions and aren’t sure where to go. Incidentally, our recent Getting Started Guides feature helps with this problem!
Boot from thumb drive mac. TL;DR: Open Source Business Intelligence. Installs in 5 minutes, usable by everyone in your company, download it here.
At some point, you get tired of rewriting the same system at every job. You ask around, and it seems like everyone else has written one too. Boot from a usb mac. Each of the top tech companies wrote one (or several) of their own — HiPal at Facebook, EasyData at LinkedIn, Sherpa at Google, AirPal at Airbnb, Avocado at Yammer and more. The initial requests vary — a desire to keep track of how many videos get uploaded every week, to look up a user and see all their transactions, to quote ad inventory to potential buyers, or pull up a list of inactive accounts.
At the heart of all these questions is the desire for non-technical coworkers to be able to pull information out of the company’s databases on their own.
Bootable macos on windows. Rather than reinventing the wheel you think “Let’s see what the 1000 vendors in the space have been up to since last time I looked”. It becomes quickly apparent that the landscape is strewn with products that only work in demo mode to the C-Suite, are so complicated that training and certification is a revenue stream or are so overspecialized that they have to be matched with 10 other tools to get a day’s work done.
Despite this overwhelming flood of vendors, tools, jargon, acronyms and overhyped startups, if you want to take the information in a database and let everyone in your company access it, you’re left deciding whether you want a complicated unusable solution that costs you thousands of dollars a year or a complicated unusable solution that costs millions of dollars a year.
Like others who have either started or worked in tech startups, we’ve grown used to reaching for open source software when we need an operating system, blogging software, a web server or a programming language. Despite some points of light, the open source BI options are uniformly hard to install, hard to configure and targeted at experts.
Metabase Pricing
And so, a year ago, we found ourselves having to write the system again. It needed to be secure, easy to install, play well with modern deployment patterns and most importantly easy to use by our non-technical coworkers. We’ve been testing it with the companies we worked with in the Expa portfolio as well as a select number of outside companies. With over a year of running Metabase in production, we’ve learned a lot about how to get information out to those on the front lines of growing companies and poured it back into our product.
Today, we’re open sourcing Metabase. We intend it to be the obvious first step for every company to get the data so painstakingly collected to those most able to make use of it. Get it from www.metabase.com/start, install it in 5 minutes, and make everyone in your company smarter.
It’s 2015, stop paying for basic BI.
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-The Metabase Team