Data is Beautiful
I recently came across an expensive marketing strategy, which was supposed to outline my client’s customer profiles. Sounded promising, until we went a little deeper and found that beneath the customer profiles there was… nothing.
So, I now put hands to keyboard for a whirl around the dance floor with you and a good friend you simply must meet… Data.
Here are my top three reasons why data needs to be the belle of every founder’s ball.
Reason number Three: decision making becomes a breeze.
In a startup there will be lots you are short on, but one thing you'll have plenty of is decisions. There are excellent free guides to support much of the decision making and anyone in NZ who has not yet visited business.govt.nz should find a spare 45 minutes to follow their nose through that site. I’ve met some of the team and they had the admirable goal of building a usable website with useful content.
But once you’re past the templatable basics, which have finite answers and can be quiz-ised, things are not so simple.
Our minds are prone to make and remake decisions in a cycle that’ll drive anyone to distraction, and certainly to loss of sleep. What’s keeping you up at night and haunting your dreams? The answer, almost certainly, is a decision you need to make.
Night and day, sleeping and waking, we turn over the options, looking at them from all sides. The wrong move can feel utterly unpleasant and, above all things, we seek to avoid making a decision later regretted.
Enter Data, the goddess of decision making. Her gown is a rich blue and while at first she seems intimidating, unreachable, when you work up the nerve to introduce yourself the conversation flows. Data is the true friend that has been missing from your life.
When you need to know which markets to target first, or which demographic is most likely to buy your product, or which product attributes are the most important to your consumer, the numbers will tell you. Hooray!
Reason number two: Instant credibility.
A man I admire once called the financial model “the sanity check”. Front up with data-backed forecasts and you will find it much easier to operate above the line of credibility. Investors aside, high calibre advisors and service providers want high calibre clients. We are reassured by the verified assumption and quick to spot missing pieces.
Reason number one: Product-Market-Fit.
This is the goal to end all goals. Designing a great product / service isn’t one-and-done (what in business is?) there are several stages. Stage one is creating the thing we want to build, stage two features a whole lot of adapting it into the thing that the paying customers want, until finally we are ready to scale and to enter the third stage … redesigning to fit the machinery / tech capabilities / laws of the land / budget.
The process from idea to commercial product is a möbius strip of build, test, learn, repeat - and for worthwhile results every metric must be recorded and analysed. The quality of your continuous improvement process depends on how well your research is designed, and on the collection and analysis of the resulting data.
Now that you’re familiar with Data’s fine qualities and keen to hold her hand, the question is HOW? Where do these glorious numbers come from?
The answer, of course, is research. A lot of lovely, thoughtfully designed, scrupulously verified, research. Anecdotally, founders can be reluctant to invest in high quality research and information management, but those who do will see the benefits pay dividends long after the invoice has been paid. Note - not all researchers are worth it! Due diligence, as always, is crucial. We’ll help with this in a fresh blog.
