Accurate revenue forecasting is crucial for Marley Spoon's business. As the company expanded, the business analysis team started reaching the bottleneck of spreadsheets:

• Difficult to manage — with a complex cohort revenue model across multiple dimensions, the Excel file used to take 5 minutes to run, with no good way to keep track of different versions and run scenarios
• Disconnected from data — Marley Spoon needed to pull actuals from a data warehouse, and push the outputs of the model into Looker
• Difficult to share — the Excel file was too complex to directly share, so the team had to maintain separate Google Sheets displaying simple outputs for stakeholders.
• Difficult to visualise data — The model’s complexity made it extremely cumbersome to create compelling visuals, and the disconnect of the output Sheets from the core model meant that visuals had to be manually updated as the model evolved.

Dina, Marley Spoon’s business analysis lead, was looking for a solution that would be flexible enough to support a bespoke and complex revenue model (including cohorts) connected to their data warehouse, while easily supporting multiple versions and scenarios, and being able to present directly to stakeholders.