Introducing QuantMar, a knowledge-sharing website for performance marketers

Published on June 3, 2019 by Eric Benjamin Seufert

Today I am pleased to announce the launch of QuantMar, a knowledge-sharing and Q&A website for performance marketers. The premise of QuantMar is simple: users can sign up and ask and answer questions related to performance marketing. I like to think of QuantMar as a StackExchange for performance marketers: it’s a place where best practices and wisdom around user acquisition and quantitative marketing (thus QuantMar) can be shared, indexed, and referenced.

I built QuantMar because I believe that performance marketing, as a discipline and career path, is too opaque. Universities don’t do an adequate job of preparing students for careers in performance marketing, most institutional knowledge about performance marketing is unique to specific products and verticals, and the vast majority of free, educational material related to performance marketing is low-value, biased content marketing written by vendors.

The innovations that have benefited digital marketing and mobile monetization over the past few years have allowed new commercial paradigms (like Direct To Consumer) to bloom into billion dollar industries. Much of this is driven by hyper-targeted performance marketing — my aspiration is for QuantMar to become the hub at which the best marketers learn, share, and are vetted and recruited by the best companies.

The sad reality is that the lack of acknowledged, industry-wide best practices for performance marketing benefits the multitude of middle-men that exist in the advertising landscape: when there’s not clear consensus on eg. how to measure retention, or how to calculate LTV, or how to track cross-channel install attribution on mobile, or how CPI traffic is delivered, then rent-seeking behavior steps in to profit from that ignorance. From my perspective, facilitating the sharing of this basic insight helps all advertisers by killing the market for bad behavior.

Additionally, the opacity of this field makes it difficult for companies to find and recruit top talent. When a company is making its first user acquisition hire, it can be difficult for them to evaluate the candidates they meet since so few standards exist to assess experience as valuable or not. QuantMar provides a venue for the best performance marketers to showcase their knowledge and abilities (with more features aimed at recruitment / expertise recognition on the 2019 product roadmap), making them easy for hiring managers to discover and pursue.

And finally, I believe the future of education for applied fields like performance marketing, which combines a broad set of academic disciplines like statistics, economics, marketing, and computer science into a practical framework, is collaborative knowledge-sharing — a real-time, dynamic Socratic method. Performance marketing moves too quickly and is too multi-disciplinary to be capably taught in a classroom. I believe QuantMar can become the MBA program for performance marketers.

A vast number of public and private Slack groups have been organized to facilitate knowledge sharing amongst marketers, but Slack is not a good tool for indexing information for later reference. The Mobile Dev Memo Slack team, for example, has had more than 2,000 people register as members since launch, and I see the same questions and conversations being raised consistently. Marketing Slack groups are great places to trade time-sensitive, market-related intelligence (eg. “Has anyone else seen FB CPMs increase this month?”) and gossip, but they’re not very good places to permanently store wisdom and establish common best practices.

QuantMar has been live in a limited beta for the past two weeks, and already an encouraging volume of high-quality content has been written for the platform. I’d specifically like to thank the founding members of the site for helping me to QA features, think about product improvements, and contribute content: Olivier Lemarie, Thomas Petit (@thomasbcn), Shamanth Rao (of the How Things Grow podcast), and Avinash S.

Here are some topics that I suggest reading to get started:

Happy reading!