It started with our own business
Before Marcel existed, we ran an e-commerce and retail start-up. A product we believed in, a marketing budget neatly planned out, and the conviction that this was best left to specialists.
So that is what we did. Several performance marketing freelancers, one after the other, and at one point even an agency. Each with their own rate, their own way of reporting and their own channel to look at. Together it cost us an enormous amount — and still, every month, we were the ones laying the invoices side by side to see where the money had gone.
Meta here. Google there. A separate mail platform. Each with its own login, its own invoice and its own way of showing results — all of them slightly different, which meant the numbers were never really comparable.
The breaking point
One day I asked our performance marketer a question I already knew the answer to. Our ROAS had dropped, I knew why, and I wanted to find out whether he knew too. Call it a test.
What followed was silence. He typed my question into ChatGPT word for word and read the answer back to me.
There was nothing dishonest about it as such — the answer was even correct. But I was paying a serious amount every month for something I could have looked up myself in thirty seconds.
What that taught us
Marketing theory is no longer a secret. The rules of thumb, the benchmarks, the explanation behind a falling ROAS: it is all online, and a language model finds it faster than anyone. Paying hundreds a month for that makes no sense.
What you do need a human for is strategy. Someone who knows your shop is closed in July, that your biggest competitor just opened around the corner, or that a product line is disappearing next season. No model gets that out of your numbers.
So we split the two: automate the theory, and keep the human where they make the difference.
So we built what we were missing
Marcel is the platform we were looking for and could not find anywhere. Not yet another dashboard full of graphs, but one place where everything sits side by side: what each channel costs, what it brings in, and what you should do about it this week.
Two things were certain. It had to be clearer — one overview in which your channels are genuinely comparable, in the same language and the same units. And it had to be more efficient — managing your ads, your content and your mailings without logging in somewhere else every time.
The Monday brief: AI with a human voice
Every Monday morning Marcel looks at all your channels together. It sums up your week, names what could be better and gives concrete advice for the week ahead. That is the part a model does better and faster than a person.
And then one of us looks it over. They add what isn't in your numbers: your season, your neighbourhood, your plans. So you don't get a bare machine summary, but advice someone is willing to put their name to.
That is exactly what makes it affordable. You are no longer paying for hours spent looking up theory, only for the thinking along — and that is a great deal less than a marketer on the payroll or an agency.
Why it is called Marcel
Marcel was our founder's grandfather. He started with nothing: he went underground as a coal miner. Through hard work and never stopping learning, he built a business of his own out of that — a driven businessman, from the ground up.
And it wasn't only the hard work that got him there. He had a feel for the other half of it too: that a good product is worth nothing as long as nobody knows about it. Talking to customers, making sure people knew his name and remembered it — he enjoyed that, and he was good at it. Marketing, only it wasn't called that yet.
So the platform carrying his name is not a marketing idea, it is a tribute to him. And it is the bar we hold everything to: advice you would not dare put in front of someone like that — because you cannot explain the reasoning behind it — has no business being in there.
Where we are now
Marcel is in its test phase. That means we work closely with our first customers and build the platform around what they actually need — no features just because they look good on a sales page.
That is why the first five customers get to use Marcel completely free for as long as the test phase runs. In return, all we ask for is your honest opinion.