“We’re all familiar with this concept of failing fast, but this is flawed unless you are capturing the right data to see where you were going wrong and how you could improve.”

Successful Product/Service Launch. 95% of new product launches fail. Is this because they were bad ideas? Not always. In an era of user reviews, comparison tools, and personalisation the smallest element could make a crucial difference. Details matter. So how do you find that 5% winning ideas quickly? Market research, focus groups, interviews etc are all time consuming and expensive and have made some high-profile mis-steps. (Anyone remember New Coke?) The most efficient product development cycle is to build a minimum viable product (MVP) quickly, test release to your market, and gather data. If you receive early signals that it is something people want, then all go in! This approach has already been used to great success on sites like Kickstarter. Prove your concept with a real audience, gather data, optimise your offering and then expand your product launch with confidence.

Financial Health. When you have scattered data, it’s difficult to have a holistic view over how and where your business is growing. Worse still, you don’t know where you are spending and wasting money. It is not uncommon for us to hear horror stories where companies didn’t realise they were losing money for months because some of their systems took too long to reconcile, leaving them with blind spots of their daily financial health.

Adhoc Data Means Inaccuracies. If you don’t standardise your definitions and data sources, then you’re likely making mistakes when pulling together data for investor decks or company updates. It’s no good having a slide on CAC where that number means one thing one month and another the next! Not only is this a time-drain, could lead to the wrong decision being made but its something which can easily be automated and modelled to perfection.

Growing Pains. Marketing is key to any startup growth, but also often an area of waste in terms of both opportunity and budget. Marketing channels are greedy and different platforms will claim the same conversion, costing you more money but also distorting your true cost per acquisition. It’s a daunting task to centralise all marketing spend, connect with your first-party data and apply an attribution model that will give you clarity on what is really converting customers. But doing so enables you to model everything from Customer Lifetime Value, Customer Acquisition Cost, ROI Calculations and more. By de-duplicating conversions we also typically see a cost saving of at least 20% of ad spend.

You’ll Need The Data Later. The more data you have, the easier trends and analysis becomes. So think about what metrics would be useful to you in the future and start recording those numbers today. It may take weeks or even months to get an accurate picture but it’s much better than starting completely fresh X months down the line.

“It’s a story we’ve heard many times before. When a startup is looking for their next round of investment, they suddenly they need all this data they haven’t been recording.”