TranscendsAI: Positioning a Self-Hosted MMP
Create a necessity-based control in the marketing tech industry based on MMP.
How can we position a new company in a highly complex market like self-hosted mobile performance MMP?
- Brand Direction
- Design
- User Research
- Market Research
Self-hosted mobile measurement server.
Every app that spends on ads needs to know which ad produced which install. That job belongs to a category of hosted third-party tools whose bill scales with your growth. Your raw event data lives on their servers, released back to you on their terms.
- Role
- Brand & Web Designer (sole designer)
- Timeline
- 3 weeks
- Team
- CEO, Software Engineer, Sales Manager (8-person company)
- Tools
- Problem Definition
We weren’t sure how to position TranscendsAI in the market.
The owner described the product as the only fully private, self-hosted MMP server on the market.
In this conversation, he expressed that the main goal was to focus on an executive role, likely CMO or CFO.
The problem was that there wasn’t anything that could support this statement; his technology was advanced but needed to be supported with research and data that would indeed help them position.
- Research
There are already MMP solutions offering a self-hosted server
During the research phase, multiple funded competitors already occupy that position. Claiming to be the only self-hosted MMP server would have damaged the brand from the start.
Grovs explicitly positions itself as not an MMP because they refuse to partner with or pass data back to major ad networks (Meta, Google, TikTok, etc.). While this is excellent for strict EU privacy compliance and first-party apps, apps at $2M–$10M/month UA spend depend on cross-network attribution and sending postbacks to Self-Attributing Networks (SANs).
LinkForty is a fantastic open-source initiative, but it is built for developer-heavy startups and independent apps. At $250M ARR, engineering time is too expensive to spend maintaining, patching, and scaling an open-source attribution database.
Singular deploys a dedicated, isolated Data Clean Room environment on a secure perimeter that you control. It gives your CFO the data privacy and ownership they want, while giving your UA team native cost aggregation across 1,200+ networks and unparalleled ROAS reporting without breaking your existing attribution workflows.
The actual ICPs were VP of User Acquisition, VP of Growth, or Head of Performance Marketing.
The research revealed that the real user who would see the value in this product wasn’t the CMO or CFO.
The ICPs who struggle most with this pain are the VP of User Acquisition, VP of Growth, or Head of Performance Marketing.
- Pain Points
What are they looking for
Once we knew who would actually use the product, the next question was what this ICP struggles with. I used Google Trends and AnswerThePublic to find the questions VPs of User Acquisition, Growth, and Performance Marketing ask about MMP solutions.
- What does it cost to build and run your own MMP server
- Why self-host mobile measurement instead of paying for SaaS?
- AppsFlyer alternative
- Self-hosted analytics vs SaaS MMP
These questions kept us from positioning the product the wrong way and focused us on what buyers actually needed.
- Hypothesis Based on Research
We found out that the most important thing for them was not just the cost reduction but also owning and controlling their own data and being able to customize it as they wanted with a very small setup.
- Competitor Research
Once we knew the exact ICP, we could design a positioning strategy around what they care about
- Building Process
Focus on the two most important pain points of the ICP
Easy to set up and Complete ownership and control
This gave us a huge advantage over other platforms: competitors were either low cost but complex to set up, or easy to set up at the cost of control and ownership.
USP section about the benefits of TranscendsAI
Work in unique iconography and style that represents how you can transcend to a better MMP server with TranscendsAI
Use of hexagons as a representation of thousands of attribution data points organized compactly into a single form. Transcending more than just a hexagon.
We designed every single section in a way that explains why to choose TranscendsAI, based on our research
The first section focuses on problem solving and the pain of the ICP.
Straight to the solution. The keyword carousel is built on YOU, so the visitor feels ownership before reading anything else.
3D concepts that represent the core and the data process that TranscendsAI does.
Focused on the problem the ICP has.
Server chaos that comes from everywhere, all connected to TranscendsAI.
After making the user understand he has a problem, we show that he's not the only one, that this is how the industry works, and how we are breaking the status quo by doing it differently.
A comparison between what is happening today and how TranscendsAI breaks that and makes it better.
Highlights the USP of how it transcends the differences from other providers in the market.
We start a section to segment the audience, since the call must be with high-quality leads. This section helps discard leads that might not be ready yet to work with TranscendsAI.
Reinforces owning your own data and everything that comes with it.
This is a high-ticket product. The section filters out anyone not prepared to buy it.
The Process and FAQs reply to and show the processes most asked about in Google searches, allowing us to rank the site in SEO and GEO when users ask those specific questions.
Transparency is used as a competitive advantage, so the client can see exactly how something this expensive will work.
Built for SEO and GEO, answering the exact questions the ICP searches for, which positions the page faster.
- Final Design
We finished the assembly of a highly responsive site focused on converting warm leads into future clients.
- Outcomes
Google already recommends TranscendsAI as one of the options in the market compared to our competitors.
After the ship and test, Google can already recommend TranscendsAI as a better result than the other competitors that were taken into consideration during the research, surpassed only by Singular.
In cold discovery queries, it won’t surface a product this new.
This comes from a comparison query. The positioning was written for the warm case: a VP of Growth who already knows the category and is weighing options. Asked which of these four fit a self-hosted, high-control setup, TranscendsAI came back as a recommended choice.
- What I will do differently
I would like to focus more on the communicative areas of the brand and its interactions, such as a hexagonal cube instead of a render cube, which matches the concept of all the hexagons better.
With more time, I would work more on the concept of the hexagon and show an image that is a little more corporate and innovative.
I think the brand still has a lot of potential to look much better and position itself as a leading brand if we keep the same flow.