Playbook - 173tech

Customer Behaviour

Modelling complex relationships in a B2B2C setting

Objective

Replace an expensive off-the-shelf analytics tool with a tailored, scalable solution.

Obstacle

Designing a layered analytics approach that could meet the needs of multiple user types.

Outcome

Fully embedded analytics, serving both the business and its creator community.

Background

Playbook is the leading creator-economy platform for fitness, wellness, and sports, empowering creators to build, grow, and monetise their personal brands. Offering a powerful blend of SaaS tools and membership services, the platform enables creators to streamline operations, connect with audiences, and scale their businesses.

As Playbook expanded, managing its growing and complex data ecosystem became increasingly difficult. Off-the-shelf analytics tools were too rigid to capture the unique relationships between creators, subscribers, and the business itself. To overcome these challenges, Playbook partnered with 173tech to design and implement a custom data infrastructure that could truly reflect the nuances of their B2B2C model.

Challenges

Business Model: Off-the-shelf tools often struggle to accommodate the unique needs of B2B2C business models, where the platform must serve both creators and the business itself. This dual focus requires tailored dashboards that provide actionable insights for creators to grow their audiences and monetise effectively, while also enabling the business to monitor performance and optimise operations. With creators, internal teams and stakeholders all consuming data, the demands on the infrastructure are significantly higher than in more traditional setups.

Subscription Levels: Adding another layer of complexity, creators on Playbook operate across different subscription tiers, with varying audience sizes, engagement models, and revenue structures. This required deeply customised reporting to account for unique data patterns across creator types, something no one-size-fits-all solution could deliver.

Solution

Understanding the Business:
It might sound counterintuitive, but as a data agency, we do not start with your data. Instead, we always begin by focusing on your business problems, those burning questions and critical decisions where data can truly drive impact. By understanding the specific challenges you’re facing, we can tailor our approach to ensure that data solutions align with your goals. This approach allows us to take a deeper dive into the key aspects of your business, ensuring that any data we collect and analyse will directly serve to solve your issues.

Customer Journey: One of the first steps we took was to map out the customer journey from two distinct perspectives: that of the client, in this case, a personal trainer, and that of the subscriber, who consumes the content and services provided. By doing so, we identify the key moments where intervention could have the most significant effect, whether it was improving engagement, optimising the experience, or driving conversions. From there, we determine the crucial metrics to track, ensuring that every piece of data we collect is aligned with measurable outcomes.

Impact

One Source Of Truth: We extracted, centralised, and modelled Playbook’s core data, translating it into clear, accessible metrics across automated dashboards. This structure provided instant visibility for both internal teams and external creators, reducing manual reporting and enabling faster, more informed decisions.

Cost Savings: Our bespoke solution replaced expensive off-the-shelf tools, cutting reporting costs by 85% while improving performance and scalability. Built for efficiency from the outset, the system required minimal maintenance and began delivering value within weeks of implementation.

Key Insights: With the new infrastructure in place, Playbook can now offer data-driven insights not just internally but directly to creators, a key differentiator in their market. This embedded analytics capability strengthens creator relationships, drives engagement, and underpins sustainable growth.