TranscendsAI: Positioning a Self-Hosted MMP
Create a necessity-based control on 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 & Product 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 indeed would help them to 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 ICP were VP of User Acquisition, VP of Growth, or Head of Performance Marketing.
The research reveals that the real user who will see the value in this product wouldn’t be the CMO or CFO.
The ICPs who struggle more 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
We focused 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 design every single section in a way that explain the reason why to choose Transcends AI base of our research
Straight to the solution. The keyword carousel is built on YOU, so the visitor feels ownership before reading anything else.
Focused on the problem the ICP has
A comparison between what is happening today and how Transcends breaks that and makes it better.
Focused on the problem the ICP has
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.
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
The research changed the positioning claim and the target buyer before launch.
The “only fully private, self-hosted MMP” claim was dropped after competitor research showed it was false. The target buyer moved from CMO/CFO to VP of User Acquisition, VP of Growth, and Head of Performance Marketing, and the entire content strategy was rebuilt around that.
Asked which of the four options fits a self-hosted, high-control setup, the model returned TranscendsAI over Singular.
It’s important to mention that in cold discovery queries, it won’t surface a product this new. This is one query, not a measurement.
-What I would do differently
I never spoke to an actual VP of User Acquisition. The ICP correction came from search data and conversations with the sales manager, not from the buyer. One or two calls with a real UA lead would have either confirmed the positioning or caught something the search data missed.
On the visual side, the render cube should have been a hexagonal form to match the iconography concept. With more time I’d push the hexagon system further and study more brands in the category.