Early customers use Crosshatch to do two things
- Replace lengthy on-boardings with a tap
- Enable activation of up-to-date user context
In the past, consumer companies have gotten to know users by
- asking users lengthy questionnaires
- watching users use their app (e.g., via CDPs)
These methods are challenging because they’re high friction, expensive and signal poor.
Onboarding questionnaires are nice in theory. The longer the questionnaire the more signal you might get about your customer. But that also increases friction: The more questions you ask, the less likely a user is to complete it.
Every time you ask the user click you lose half of them.
(AKA why tutorials, splash screens, and lengthy signup flows are a bad idea)
A16Z’s Andrew Chen wrote in February of this year.
And while CDPs have been selling the promise of real-time personalization from first party data for the better part of a decade, all but the largest players are coming up disappointed.
The truth is, first-party data constrained to a single app’s context isn’t enough to meet consumer expectations. If you want to meet consumers where they are, you need the whole story, not just the limited slice you see.
Crosshatch solves both these problems with identity: allowing consumers to log in with all their context in a tap, and brands to activate it in just a few lines of code.
Unlike personalization solutions of the past, Crosshatch is cheap to implement and works as soon as your first user logs in.
No more learning curves
Suppose you want to ship a personalized user experience. How do you do it?
According to McKinsey, you must
Invest in customer data and analytics foundations. Find and train translators and advanced tech talent. Build agile capabilities. Protect customer privacy
This sounds like a lot of work! We’ve been there – shipping personalized experiences in the past required
- instrumenting reliable events data over a lot of customers
- associating that to outcomes you care about
- Training models that predict outcomes from event patterns
- monitoring performance
This baggage leads many folks to ask if Crosshatch has a chicken or the egg problem.
Their intuition? To ship personalization you need to aggregate a lot of user data first! Right?
Wrong.
Language models make activating user context a single API call.
With language models, the old ways of personalization feel bloated and strikingly old fashioned.
Crosshatch takes a radically different approach: When a user links their data to an app with Crosshatch, that app activates connected context through language models. This allows Crosshatch to deliver users and developers value as soon as a user links data, not after lengthy and expensive speculative build outs.
Where should a user stay in Paris?
curl -L 'https://proxy.crosshatch.io/chat/completions?api-version=2024-06-01' \
-H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
-H 'Accept: application/json' \
-H 'Crosshatch-Replace: {"hotel_history" : {"select": ["entity_name", "entity_city", "order_total", "originalTimestamp"], "from": "personalTimeline", "where": [{"field":"entity_subtype1", "op":"=", "value": "TRAVEL_TRANSPORTATION"}, {"field":"event", "op":"=", "value":"purchased"}], "limit": 100}}' \
-H 'Crosshatch-Provider: gpt-4o' \
-H 'Authorization: Bearer $USER_BEARER_TOKEN' \
--data '{
"messages": [
{
"role": "user",
"content": "Consider the users past hotel spending {hotel_history}. Based on this context, where might the user like to stay in Paris?"
}
],
}'
Call the Crosshatch API to find out.
Just define relevant context hotel_history and choose a language model gpt-4o. The context hotel_history is populated or 'hydrated' using the data a user links. Crosshatch keeps this data in sync, meaning that a user engages across other apps, that context and the output of this API call automatically stays up-to date with no work from developers or users. Context coming in hot!
To ship hyper-personalization of the future, you don't need the McKinsey recommended
- expensive infrastructure
- advanced tech talent
- cross-disciplinary project teams
- or hairy privacy infrastructure
Crosshatch compresses all of this to a single API with all the usual benefits
- reduced customer acquisition costs by as much as 50 percent
- increased revenues by 5 to 15 percent
- increased marketing ROI by 10 to 30 percent.
To start personalizing on context users share, reach out to create an account.
