MxU builds with laser focus on Equals

“Finally, a product that feels like it was made for me. I know SQL, I know spreadsheets, and everything I do needs to happen fast. Now I can optimize our engineering efforts more efficiently and reliably than I could in any other legacy tool (or worse, several platforms stitched together).” – Mike Johns, VP of Product

Discovering the opportunity

While some of us kick our feet up on Sunday mornings, the church community hits the ground running. MxU is a company that’s revolutionizing volunteer team health by bringing the same software skills and insights applied in the business world, to churches. Their platform is built to offer better training and recruiting practices in a centralized location, so that all church groups can deliver meaningful weekend experiences at the highest level for everyone attending.

Before joining MxU, Mike led product research efforts at a VC backed company – busy flexing his number crunching muscles. He’d used several analytics tools in the past, but when checking them out in his new startup role he was shocked to discover that these products were really only built for enterprise companies. In pursuit of a system that could handle tons of data without needless negotiations or obscure pricing, Mike had pulled together a few different tools to meet his needs before discovering Equals.

Implementing changes

Immediately after looking at the website, Mike set up an account and moved all product metrics into a single consolidated dashboard. He set the queries in the workbook to update daily and now shares these insights across the company, to provide everyone with a bird’s eye view into the business. The setup of this model was so intuitive and powerful that additional applications immediately came to mind. When you have a user base as large as that of MxU, making product decisions based on intuition or conversations alone can be dangerous. Now, whenever there’s a new feature that’s been recently released, Mike sets up a tracking system in Equals that allows him to instantly pinpoint areas for optimization in the product pipeline.

Favorite feature: “Without a doubt it’s direct SQL access in a spreadsheet canvas. I can use SQL when that’s easier, and a spreadsheet function when that’s easier, and get the upside from both worlds. The query performance is rock solid. There’s no way I could have built these pipelines so quickly with any other platform, and the insights we’re getting are really moving the needle on product efficiency.”

Unlocking growth

One of the most challenging things about driving feature adoption is being able to trust your data and iterate on the fly. With previous solutions, the team at MxU realized that important queries wouldn’t update regularly or would break at critical moments. Now, Mike can focus engineering efforts on the steps in the funnel that really matter – so that the new releases they’ve worked hard on provide benefits to all churchgoers. MxU guarantees that all production related functions are in sync and in tune for their churches, and on Equals we make sure that they never miss a beat!