Podcast “It’s Marketing’s Fault” with Gala from Gaille Reports
Recently, Gala, owner of Gaille Reports, had a conversation with Eric Rutherford in the marketing podcast “It’s Marketing’s Fault”. Gala shared her story about starting a startup in Portugal, marketing analytics and marketing reporting automation.
You can check the full podcast here:
I would like to share with you some highlights of this conversation.
Conversation with Eric
Eric: What’s the entrepreneurial scene look like in Portugal?
Gala: Lisbon is a special place that attracts a lot of digital nomads and tech and crypto startups. So there are a lot of communities here, like startups and businesses, and a lot of people who are interested in developing something.
The government creates the conditions for these people on purpose, in order to attract new entrepreneurs and creative people. They create laws that facilitate digital nomads’ adaptation. For example, when you open a business and they have a really good startup program that makes your stay in this wonderful country legal.
Besides that, until 2024 there was a low tax policy for digital nomads under Non Habitual Residence status.
It has a lot of benefits actually, for me, at least. I have a really good startup incubator with a mentor who helps me to work on my project and introduces me to the community, to investors, to other startups, so it’s really great.
Eric: Let me ask this, how did you get started building marketing reports? What was that marketing journey like?
Gala: I started to work in marketing in 2009. I worked in an office in the beginning. A very normal career. Then I started to have doubts, because the world is so big I would like to be a digital nomad for one moment in my life.
So I quit my office and started to do marketing. In the beginning I worked alone as a freelancer, as a consultant. After some time I had more clients and it started to turn into a small agency. So I had clients who paid me money and I started to have a team like who did the job manually instead of me. I started doing more managerial jobs. But every first week of the month I was doing the reports.
When you’re in an agency, you have like 10-20 clients, and you have to prepare reports every month. But I’m a bit lazy to do the same job every month, so I started to look for a solution.
It was 2018. I was familiar with Tableau and Power BI, but it didn’t really match my needs. And one day I discovered that Google had announced Google Data Studio (now Looker Studio). Because it’s Google-based, they have a lot of integrations, namely Google Sheets, Google Analytics and so on. I didn’t need to do any developer work to bring my Google Analytics data to a nice dashboard.
Using connector services, such as Supermetrics, Windsor.ai and Power My Analytics, I can get the freshest data from any platform and display it as interactive charts and tables in Looker Studio.
I showed my dashboards to my clients and they loved it! I was getting a lot of requests and I started selling it in my template store. This is the story!
Eric: What are the objectives of your startup?
All of my templates are based on real clients’ requests. After making 10 almost fully identical reports for 10 different agencies, I realized that I can make something in the middle between all these reports and sell it as a template for a little money.
My main idea is that I want to help small businesses to automate their marketing and sales reports, make the business more efficient to have more revenue and grow. If small businesses are growing in the country, the economy in the country will grow. I want to impact and make changes in the world. I believe freelancers with small budgets, small businesses can afford to buy the report template.
Looker Studio, luckily, doesn’t require a profound set of skills to be able to work with the dashboard. Of course, at the very beginning it may be tricky but once you start exploring it, it’s not difficult anymore.
In a nutshell, it’s simple, it’s cheap and it’s for everyone.
Eric: What types of businesses are in the greatest need of implementing automated reporting?
Gala: Honestly, I want reporting automation to become a necessary element for every business, I think. Not everybody understands how it will change your work routine and how it can influence your business or whatever.
It detects the problematic aspects of your business and by analyzing and taking measures, you can easily take your business to another level.
In my template store, I have simpler reports for small companies as well as more complex ones for growing companies.
Ecommerce owners and managers, paid ads and SEO agencies, investors and small startups – everyone needs reporting automation, and Gaille Reports are always here to help!
Summary
I hope you enjoyed Gala’s marketing journey. Don’t forget to check out our template store where you can find reports that can solve your marketing challenges! Share your impressions or questions about digital marketing and marketing reporting automatization in the comments!