Marginal Science: Product Analytics, Experimentation, and Pricing
What We Do
We produce pricing, economic, and statistical analyses for your business.
We price products, design experimentation strategies, and unlock what your data tells you about customer demand and behavior.
We can:
- Be another set of eyes on an internal data, pricing, or economic analysis. A solid, low-cost way to get to know us.
- Improve your pricing with data-driven methods.
- Design an online experimentation program, and provide training for product managers and marketers starting out running their own experiments.
- Figure out where your conversion funnel performs well and where it doesn't.
- Dive deep to find out what's behind declining metrics.
- Learn what's driving surprising successes.
- Write the code for economic, statistical, or machine learning models. We can develop packages for your teams in essentially any language or framework. Reach out to learn more.
- Be plumbers. Write pipelines to automate analysis.
- Teach you and your teams how to fish. We provide training on how to run experiments better and teach new causal inference and econometric tools.
Our Principles
- Think from first principles. There are no best practices. Start from the beginning. Work out the solution step-by-step. No shortcuts.
- Write down what we want to know. Find out what we do know. Bridge the gap.
- To analyze means to cut. We write terse, direct reports relevant for making the important decisions our clients face.
- No gloss. Our reports include zero pictures of smiling people in suits. We produce facts and statistical/economic analysis, and document them in plain text.
- Iterate. The best solutions are a process. An initial solution to try, a means to test whether it worked, and a plan for how to iterate towards the best solution.
- Care.
Our Qualifications
Marginal Science is a consulting company from Zach Flynn [LinkedIn]. Me.
I have a PhD in Economics, and I've worked in both the technology industry and in litigation consulting.
I have expertise in the following areas:
- Experimentation. I have broad, extensive knowledge of experimentation. How to design experiments. How to analyze experiments. How to build an experiment-driven culture at the company. I've done significant original work in this space. My blog has introduced new ideas in experimentation.
- Pricing. I've built pricing models both for transactional products and subscription products at Udemy and Amazon. My pricing philosophy combines economic theory and data to incrementally improve prices, rather than making large jumps to some theoretical "optimal" price. For one thing, it's not possible to find an optimal price for technical reasons (we are looking for a price better than what we've done before, so we can't have any data at the prices we're moving to, but to find the optimal price, we need global identification of the demand function, so we would need to see prices at the prices we're trying to move to, which we haven't tried before! See my blog post for more details.) Also: the theoretical optimal price is constantly changing as demand and other factors fluctuate. A better approach is to focus our modeling on figuring out where we are under and over priced, adjust prices accordingly, and update our decisions as we get more data at the new prices.
- Product Analytics. Statistical analysis that helps you understand your product and your customers better. My background in economics and varied experience has left with a very large toolkit and exposure to a broad variety of problems. If the solution to your problem involves analyzing data, I can help out.
Check out my CV for more on my background, feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn, and I look forward to working with you!
I work on projects of all sizes. It can be very small. Even if it's just something like: "We did this analysis. Can you just give us a second pair of eyes on it?" I'll take a look. Or: "I just want to know if we're walking down the right path here. Can you give us your take on this idea we have?" I'll give my take.
Contact Us
About Us
Who is Marginal Science?
Marginal Science is a consulting company from Zach Flynn [LinkedIn]. He has a PhD in Economics and experience working on pricing, experimentation, and product analytics in the tech industries with companies like Udemy, Amazon, and Fivetran and in economic consulting (Compass Lexecon).
Where does the name Marginal Science come from?
In economics, we think about what happens on the margin. What if the price were a little more or a little less? What if a few more customers heard about your product? Answering these questions is key to understanding what you should do.
Not thinking on the margin is a mistake.
If we only think about our current customers, we don't grow. We're not stretching ourselves to the frontier. We're too far inside the margin.
If we think about customers who wouldn't even consider our current products, we'll have to make decisions without leveraging our key advantage: data and experience from the business we've built so far. We're looking too far ahead. The key is to think on the margin. How can we improve what we've done? How do we take the next step?
Where is Marginal Science?
We are based in Chicago, U.S.A. We work anywhere with internet.