Want to know where engineers use your products? – SnapEDA knows

SnapEDA has just launched its new analytics service for component suppliers, SnapInsights. The service provides business and engineering executives with insights into how engineers discover, design-in, and ultimately purchase their products. Sound all well and good, but how does it work? SnapInsights tracks and reports aggregated information on component design-ins from SnapEDA’s design search engine, which has over a million engineers using its models. The company track millions of data points including the most designed-in electronic components, most viewed components, most popular PCB design tools, as well as where engineers are designing. SnapInsights then leverages this data to provide anonymised insights about how engineers are designing with a component supplier’s products. More than just raw metrics, SnapEDA aims to provide component suppliers actual actionable insights into the entire design cycle. Something that would allow component suppliers to identify opportunities to increase the adoption for their existing products, and also aid them in product development with broader market data. “Engineers use SnapEDA at the beginning of their designs when they’re selecting components. Suppliers can use the insights offered by SnapInsights to understand and maximize design-in opportunities, and ultimately, grow their revenue,” Sofía Henao, Data Manager at SnapEDA, explains in a press release. So there are two legs to this company, SnapEDA which focuses on helping design engineers to work out the best solution for their product while at the same time removing hurdles within the design process to allow for a quicker overall development. The second leg is the SnapInsights part of the business which focuses on the component suppliers which seeks to provide guidance to when a design-in is likely to turn into a purchase, which then would allow sales and marketing teams to focus their resources on ROI-yielding tactics. A potential trend spotter Another interesting part about SnapEDA is that it has become a source of insights in regards to trends and industry movement. Analysing query's and download from the platform provides some insight into what is to come. As an example the company points to a quite surprising influx of registered engineers from consumer companies such as Disney, Nike, Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, Facebook, Netflix, Rolls-Royce, John Deere. And what were they doing? Well they were jumping onboard the connectivity train, wanting to add connectivity and intelligence to their devices And we’ve seen this before, technology companies that are branching out into hardware design for their own product – remember SnapChat with their Spectacles. And now it’s the consumer companies turn. “During the pandemic, it's been inspiring to see companies focused on devices to support the pandemic, including UV robots that drive around autonomously to sanitize rooms. We’ve also seen companies who traditionally have made connected toys shifting their roadmaps to support the effort to create ventilators,” the company writes. SnapEDA is a fairly young company and has made some strides within its short lifetime. The company launched the platform back in 2013 – which today its used by over one million engineers. Evertiq reached out to founder and CEO Natasha Baker to better understand how the company has managed to develop, and launched, two quite comprehensive platforms during this time. Natasha explains that one of the major challenges has definitely been balancing the available resources between the community and supplier side. But now the company has two – very different, but similar – services to its name. “We've been collecting the data to make this possible for over 5 years now. The actual platform itself has been in development for about a year, however, we expect to continue developing and expanding it further,” says the CEO when asked about the development time for the new SnapInsights. She elaborates saying that initially, the number one focus for the company was on the engineering side of the equation; mainly because the team itself is truly driven by the company mission “to help engineers design faster by removing barriers.”And as Natasha points out “we needed to build critical mass on the community side first.” “Now that we have a strong offering, including patented technology, we have expanded over the past couple of years to build out our demand generation suite of tools for component suppliers. These are the tools that help them influence and drive demand and design-ins of their components, as well as track purchases to measure their success on SnapEDA on other online channels.” Besides expanding their offering, the company has also added to its workforce and is currently 23 full time employees in their team, and according to the CEO they’re still growing. In the long run, Natasha sees SnapEDA as being central to how engineers select components in the USD 300 billion+ component industry. “We see our suite of demand generation tools, including SnapInsights, as being able to provide total transparency as well as actionable insights into how suppliers can influence the design-in of their products and grow their revenue. In the long-run, engineers will be better supported with all the resources they need to stay focused on innovating. Higher-levels of abstraction will be possible since the underlying building blocks upon which these abstractions are based will be reliable,” the CEO says. “This means engineers will be able to stay focused on their mission of bringing a new idea to life, and will do it with greater efficiency than ever. It also means that we'll be able to lower the barriers to allow more people to design electronics, while bringing about more impactful products in our world. Meanwhile, suppliers will be able to better tailor their solutions to the needs of these new product designers to grow their revenue.”