A funnel report that stopped explaining anything useful.
The program began as an internal exercise, not a business idea. Here is the reasoning that led to it.
It started with a slide that no longer made sense
Several years into working with marketing analytics teams, one pattern kept repeating in quarterly reviews. A funnel chart would show a healthy conversion rate at every stage, yet the marketing team still could not answer a basic question: what actually happened between the first visit and the sale?
The funnel had become a way to summarize outcomes, not a way to understand behavior. It looked complete because every visitor fit somewhere on it. That completeness was the problem. A single straight line hides branching, backtracking, and long gaps between touches, and most teams had no method for looking underneath it.
Session-level data was already there. Nobody had built a habit of reading it as a sequence.
Most of the platforms marketing teams already use record events with timestamps, identifiers, and channels attached. The raw material for a real journey map already sits in that data. What was missing was a repeatable method for pulling it out, cleaning the gaps, and presenting it in a way a team could act on without a data science background.
A few working principles behind how this program is built
A journey map is only useful if it is built from data your team can actually access. Theoretical frameworks that require tools you do not have are not worth teaching.
Gaps and messy identity resolution are normal, not a sign of failure. Part of the method is deciding how to handle uncertainty honestly rather than papering over it.
A map with no decision attached to it is just a picture. Every module ends by asking what a team would actually change because of what they found.
Training works better in small, repeated sessions with real data than in a single long workshop. That shaped the cohort format described on the Where to Start page.
Where the name comes from
Hotilo is not an acronym and does not stand for anything grand. It was chosen because it was short, easy to say over the phone, and did not already belong to an existing analytics tool. The name carries no hidden meaning about funnels or journeys. The training does the explaining instead.
The program is run from Kraków, and sessions are delivered remotely to marketing teams regardless of where they are based, as long as scheduling allows for reasonable overlap in working hours.