Datomni’s story started in the summer of 2016 in Berlin’s Bonanza café. Our founder – Mac, stumbled upon the research article on data-driven marketing. The text presented a novel marketing resource allocation blueprint, optimizing conversion rates at every point of the customer journey.

The paper ignited his exploration of various topics related to analytics and data-driven marketing. Fast-forward a few months, Mac met Kacper as they were planning an expedition to Tanzania together. Kacper was then employed at RTB House, one of the fastest-growing marketing companies. The two shared the grievance that virtually no communities existed to discuss deep aspects of data-driven marketing and analytics. They decided to do something about it…

The group exploded in popularity. Over 200 people signed up in the first week after launch. Shortly after announcing the meetup to the community, Mac and Kacper decided to announce the first meetup, focused on discussing the paper inspiring Datomni’s creation.

Mac struggled to find the right venue for the first meetup. Most locations had a truly boring feel, and they were spaces that weren’t really stimulating exchanges of exciting ideas. 

Until one day, one of Mac’s friends  – Kai, introduced him to one of the co-founders of a startup N26, which became a multi-billion dollar company. That’s how Datomni located the right venue for the first event and a number of follow-up meetups. A few selfies later, the first meetup entered history.

Since Datomni launched the first meetup in mid-2016, it continued building communities around remarkable ideas in data-driven marketing. Datomni was sharing knowledge without asking for a dime in return to leapfrog the knowledge curve. It was thrilling to grow into a deep learning organization at a fast pace in which one year is worth 5 years of experience.

Two years of meetup life went on quickly to obtain 10 years of experience. The meetup grew to over 1000 in Berlin alone. The co-founders opened chapters in Warsaw (over 300 people), London, Brussels, Vilnius and other places. Datomni created an engaged data-science community in Europe.

Over 400 people took part in the meetups. Datomni’s co-founders were fortunate to exchange ideas with experts at Rocket Internet, Uber, Google, and many other household-name companies.

Clients started rolling in. Datomni’s team was growing.

Too many clients flocking in at once slowed down Datomni’s growth. The company made a rookie mistake of taking on things the co-founders weren’t passionate about. Growing the company, and hiring more and more people for repetitive lower-level activities, meant that the company didn’t have time for the things it appreciated the most: forward-thinking, innovation, strong expert community, and being on the knowledge frontier of data-driven marketing.

The rocket-launch start was a turning point for Datomni. The company decided to go back to its roots. These roots are made of the passion for advanced marketing analytics and data science.

Datomni came back to be a truly forward-thinking brand, exploring topics that no other marketing company that we know of, was exploring. Things like automated optimization of ad creatives using deep learning or Google Analytics enrichment.