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I talk to a lot of early-stage founders who are pretty overwhelmed by the current landscape of data tools.
So I wrote a no BS guide on the data problems you'll likely face in the early days and which tools are best suited to solve them.
link.medium.com/UZ79eGcwSob
Ryan Buick 📊 retweeted
Assault, Recon, Engineer, and Support. Each role contributes to the ingenuity of victory. In a war of tanks, fighter jets, and massive combat arsenals–your squad is the deadliest weapon. This is Battlefield 6. Wishlist now.
I've seen the following data tragedy play out at countless early-stage startups.
Product or Engineering leader comes from a big company with XYZ data tools.
Leader thinks, "Hey, this worked well for us at my last company. Let's do the same here."
Be wary of the importance of tools when it comes to self-service analytics. Tools are great. But they require constant sweat and expertise to be successful.
If you let your caveman brain win enough on small decisions, you end up with products and processes designed for you and not the customer.
This can become difficult to reason about or untangle.
To reflect on this, I've been using FigJam to map our customer processes and journeys at @Canvas from start to finish.
Once I lay out all the steps and the desired outcome of each step, it becomes easier to see where I'm not treating the customer how I would want to be treated.
It's easy to let your guard down and listen to your caveman brain that wants instant gratification for you as the founder, AE, or PM.
This desire for instant gratification often conflicts with what you would want if you were in the customer's shoes.
The Golden Rule for Startups
Asking yourself how you would want to be treated is a simple solution to seemingly complex decisions.
Startups are hard. There are hundreds of decisions you have to make each week. 🧵
Startups that don't dogfood their product are easy to spot.
Dogfooding was a big part of the magic in the early days at Flexport.
Operations teams would give you feedback on a feature (or bug 😳) you shipped in minutes.
Engineers could shadow Operations teams and see how they used features in intended or unintended ways.
Tight feedback loops helped us build better products faster. And it was fun.
San Francisco’s unfair advantage is that there’s a meetup nearly every night for whatever part of the startup ecosystem you're interested in.
Not sure where to start? Check out luma's SF event page.
buff.ly/3R0Zb9A
SF folks - any good meetups you suggest?
