Meet David
I’m David Patrykowski, co-founder and Director of Backona. I’ve spent the last 16 years in business and marketing, working across strategy, growth, and commercial execution. A few years back I teamed up with my co-founder Piotr Donica, who leads our technology and product side, to build Backona. We’re a small, bootstrapped analytics and tracking company now working with clients across the UK, US, EU, and Poland.
What inspired you to build Backona?
Piotr and I kept running into the same problem from different sides of the table. Businesses were spending real money on marketing and had no reliable way to actually measure what was working. Tracking was broken, cookie consent was killing data quality, and reporting was either too shallow or too technical for the people who actually needed to make decisions from it. We figured if we could fix the plumbing, proper server-side tracking, compliant consent management, and then make the output genuinely understandable, that was a business worth building.
What makes Backona fundamentally different from traditional marketing tools?
Most marketing tools give you dashboards full of numbers and leave you to figure out what they mean. We built Backona to close that gap, combining solid analytics infrastructure (server-side tracking, consent management) with AI that actually interprets the data for you, rather than just displaying it.
How does Backona turn complex marketing data into plain-English answers?
Instead of handing someone a dashboard and hoping they know what to look for, Backona AI sits on top of the data and does the interpretation. It flags what’s actually changed, why it likely changed, and what it means for the business, in normal language rather than marketing jargon. The goal is that a business owner shouldn’t need an analyst on staff to understand their own numbers.
How do you see AI changing marketing analytics over the next few years?
I think the shift is from reporting to advising. Right now most tools tell you what happened. The next few years are about tools that tell you what to do about it, proactively flagging problems and opportunities before you go looking for them, not just when you open a dashboard. Data quality and consent-compliant tracking become more important, not less, because AI is only as good as what it’s fed.
What are the biggest reporting mistakes businesses make today?
The two I see most: tracking too many vanity metrics and not enough of the ones tied to revenue, and treating reporting as a monthly PDF nobody reads rather than something built into daily decisions. A lot of businesses also have quietly broken tracking, from third-party cookie loss, ad blockers, or consent banners, and don’t realise their data has been wrong for months.
What metrics should every business monitor regardless of industry?
Customer acquisition cost, conversion rate at each stage of the funnel, and customer lifetime value, because together they tell you whether your growth is actually profitable, not just busy. Everything else is useful context on top of those three.
How has the product evolved since launch? What’s your long-term vision for Backona?
We started with the fundamentals: server-side tracking and consent management, because without clean, compliant data nothing built on top of it matters. Backona AI came next, layering intelligence on top of that clean data, and we’ve since added things like our ChatGPT Pixel setup service as AI-driven search and discovery becomes part of the marketing mix. Long term, the vision is for Backona to be the layer between raw marketing data and clear business decisions, for companies of any size, not just those who can afford a data team.
What advice would you give founders building in the SaaS industry?
Get the boring infrastructure right before you get exciting. It’s tempting to lead with the flashy AI feature, but if the data underneath is shaky, nothing built on top of it is trustworthy. Also, talk to your actual users constantly. Bootstrapped means you don’t get to burn cash guessing what the market wants.
Did you enjoy our interview? Do you have anything to say to our community?
Yes, thanks for having me, good questions, made me think. For anyone building or scaling a business right now: get your data foundations right early, it’ll save you a lot of pain later.
