Inside elevate.io’s Shift from Siloed Metrics to a Centralized Command Center
Sumit Rai is the Chief Product Officer at Blackbird PLC, the creators of elevate.io, the online collaborative video editor in your browser. With elevate.io, Blackbird is expanding from its traditional market of Media & Entertainment and news into a broader market, serving everyone from YouTubers and social media managers to enterprise marketing teams.
As a fast-scaling tech company operating in the digital media space, Blackbird needed a smarter way to stay on top of elevate.io’s performance, user engagement, and operational KPIs. Sumit leads those efforts, focusing on building infrastructure that supports both innovation and data-informed decisions.
As elevate.io launched and gained traction, Blackbird found themselves swimming in data, from infrastructure logs and user activity to financial metrics and campaign results. But all this valuable information lived in silos, split across different tools and platforms.
“We had data in lots of different places: our own platform, infrastructure tools, financial systems, but no single view we could rely on hourly or daily to see how the business was doing,” Sumit explained.
This fragmentation caused decision-making delays and a general feeling of being out of sync.
“You’re spending more time searching for data than analyzing it. It limits your ability to act quickly.”
When it came time to find a centralized analytics tool, Sumit already had Databox in mind. He had used it before and remembered how intuitive and visual the platform was.
“We wanted something browser-based that could connect easily to our existing stack: Google tools, accounting systems, even our own custom-built platform. Databox fits all those requirements.”
Even in the trial phase, the team was able to quickly connect multiple data sources and start using off-the-shelf dashboards with minimal customization.
“With other platforms, we were still struggling to connect a single data source. Databox just worked. It got us up and running quickly.”
Implementation was quick and straightforward. During the trial, the team hooked up several key tools, including Google Analytics and Xero. The only lift came from integrating their own platform’s backend.
“The biggest challenge was pulling custom data from our platform, but Databox made it relatively easy with their API and SDK.”
Their internal approach to analytics also evolved. Sumit described Databox as their “third tier” of data, bridging the gap between operational systems and board-level reporting.
“It’s like our management accounts. We take screenshots for board packs, and the dashboards act like a ‘screen on the wall’: a real-time summary of the business.”
Since launching Databox, Blackbird has transformed the way it monitors business performance.
“Every morning we get a snapshot of activity. I always have a tab open with our key dashboard. It’s become part of how we run the business day-to-day.”
The biggest value-add? Visualizing internal platform data that previously had no front-end.
“Databox gives us access to metrics we couldn’t see before, like real-time usage of our own platform. Before, we’d have to write custom queries. Now we just glance at a dashboard.”
While still early in the platform’s lifecycle, Databox has already helped streamline cross-functional reporting and enabled faster insights across marketing, support, and DevOps teams.
“If you’re spending too much time building reports, you’re not analyzing your data, you’re just preparing it. Databox eliminates that. It gives you real-time access to what matters.”