Consulting Services for Startups by Jonathan Crawford
End-to-End Business Intelligence for Startups
If you’re going to get where you want to go, you need a map. To grow through the Trough of Sorrow and beyond, startups need full visibility into what’s working and what isn’t in order to find their growth levers and unlock Product-Market Fit.
As a sort of Analytics “one-man-band”, I help founders outline, build/code, implement, and understand custom analytics systems catered to the company’s unique KPIs and challenges.
“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
— Stephen Hawking
“Without data, you’re just another person with an opinion.”
— W. Edwards Deming
Startup Data Insights Are Hard
Here’s why.
So Much Data, So Little Insight
In the information age, we’re all drowning in data. But how do you cut through the noise to identify the most important KPIs to monitor the health of your business and what is slowing its growth? I help startup founders outline the ideal set of dashboards that contain the core metrics of their funnel from acquisition through engagement. It’s not just about having data; it’s about transforming that data into actionable insights. By focusing on the metrics that matter most, I ensure you have a clear, concise view of your business’s performance, enabling you to make data-driven decisions with confidence. This approach not only highlights growth opportunities but also uncovers bottlenecks and inefficiencies, allowing you to address them proactively and drive sustainable growth.
Fragmented & Siloed Data
From Google Analytics to Production Databases and Salesforce, your data is scattered across multiple systems and tools, making it difficult to get a unified view of your business. This fragmentation leads to inefficiencies and blind spots, as valuable insights are lost in the shuffle. When data lives in silos, it becomes nearly impossible to correlate user behavior with revenue, track customer journeys across platforms, or measure the true impact of your marketing efforts. The result is a disjointed understanding of your business performance, hampering your ability to make informed decisions and drive growth. By integrating these disparate data sources into a cohesive, centralized system, you can unlock comprehensive insights, streamline operations, and achieve a holistic understanding of your business.
Reporting is Manual, Complex and Error-Prone
Manually compiling reports is not only time-consuming but also highly prone to errors. Startups often struggle with complex reporting processes that require pulling data from multiple sources, reconciling discrepancies, and ensuring accuracy—all while trying to meet tight deadlines. This cumbersome process distracts your team from focusing on strategic initiatives and can lead to costly mistakes and misinformed decisions. I streamline your reporting by automating data collection and integration, providing you with accurate, real-time dashboards that are easy to understand and use. By eliminating manual steps and reducing complexity, I help you achieve reliable, efficient reporting that supports better decision-making and frees up valuable resources for growth.
Inconsistent Query Methods Yield Inconsistent Results
The data you rely on for decision-making is often inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsistent. When your team is manually pulling data and creating bespoke, one-off queries, it’s easy to forget essential filters, joins, or formatting steps. This inconsistency can lead to different reports showing conflicting information, making it difficult to trust your data and leading to incorrect conclusions. My process eliminates these inconsistencies by standardizing data transformation and reporting. With a robust system in place, you get reliable, consistent data that you can trust, enabling you to make informed decisions with confidence and drive your business forward.
Maintenance & Performance Nightmares
Startups often rely on quick fixes for their data analytics needs, leading to a tangle of cascading SQL views, cumbersome long-running queries, and a constant risk of crashing their app. These hacky methods might work temporarily but come with a high cost. Cascading SQL views create a maintenance nightmare, where every change requires painstaking updates to dependent views. Long-running queries on production data can freeze your app, causing downtime and frustrating users. This inflexibility not only hampers your ability to make data-driven decisions but also puts your entire system at risk. It’s time to move away from these unreliable practices and adopt scalable, maintainable solutions that support your growth without compromising your operations.
My Background in Business Intelligence
With over 15 years as a serial entrepreneur and startup leader, I bring a founder’s perspective to building analytics systems that drive growth. Data has always been the core of my work, and I understand what’s important now and how to plan for future needs. My journey began as CEO of Storenvy, where I was one of Looker’s first five users, setting the foundation for my expertise in Business Intelligence and data science.
I have built robust data infrastructures at over ten fast-growing startups, using modern technologies like DBT, ETL systems, Segment.com, Looker, and Metabase, typically backed by Postgres or Snowflake databases. My extensive experience allows me to integrate any existing database into a cohesive analytics system, regardless of the platform.
One of my key methodologies is ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), transforming raw data into actionable insights. I streamline data processes so business leaders get quick answers without needing to navigate complex SQL queries. This process ensures you get reliable, consistent data to make informed decisions.
My experience spans creating and evangelizing data warehouses and BI tools, unlocking growth, and enabling data-driven decision-making. I have a proven track record of transforming data into strategic assets, helping startups move away from unreliable methods and adopt scalable, maintainable solutions that support growth without compromising operations.
Everything You Need To Really Understand Your Business
(My Process)
Discovery & Research
To begin, we’ll set up one or more calls where I get to know you, your challenges, and how your business currently operates. I gather enough information to understand the business model and various funnels involved, all from a data tracking perspective. I take the time to understand what you believe is working and what isn’t, delving into your current challenges and goals. I’ll gather details on your current data sources and how they’re structured to identify any insufficiencies or gaps. Additionally, I review any existing reports and dashboards to assess their effectiveness and alignment with your business objectives.
During this phase, I also work with you to clearly outline your goals for your analytics and understand who the core stakeholders and users will be. By identifying the key players who will be using the analytics system and what they need from it, we can ensure the system is tailored to provide maximum value. By gaining a comprehensive understanding of your business and its unique needs, I can leverage my background as a Startup Advisor to help you identify key tracking priorities and uncover blind spots. This thorough discovery phase sets the foundation for building an effective, tailored analytics system that drives informed decision-making and growth.
First Principles & KPI Definition
This step is perhaps the most important in the entire process. I’m a big believer in thinking about your customer base as a “village.” Imagine your business as a thriving community:
Passing Through: Some customers merely drive through your village, perhaps intrigued by a sign or a recommendation, but they don’t stay long.
Weekend Visitors: Others decide to stay for a weekend, enjoying what your business offers briefly before moving on.
Seasonal Residents: Some customers find enough value to rent a summer home, returning periodically but not committing fully.
Permanent Residents: The best customers fall in love with what your village offers and decide to move to town, becoming loyal, long-term supporters of your business.
Great businesses are built when they figure out how to get customers to “move to town.” But equally vital is understanding Why they are making that move in the first place. If you don’t understand the Why behind your customers’ behaviors, you can’t do more of what leads to the results you want. This understanding relates to the customers' Jobs-to-be-Done, which we will outline in this phase.
We begin by defining the data-centric markers that indicate a customer has “moved to town.” This involves identifying the actions, behaviors, and engagements that signify a loyal, long-term customer.
In this phase, we also discuss and create a Data Dictionary with universal definitions of key terms and metrics such as Acquisition, Activation, Engagement, Retention, Revenue, and Profit. This ensures that everyone involved has a clear and consistent understanding of these critical components.
Next, we outline the data-centric markers for each important step of the funnels involved in getting people to “move to town.” This involves identifying the key actions and behaviors that indicate progress through the funnel stages.
Understanding the Why behind your business’s successes and challenges is crucial. This phase lays the groundwork for a cohesive and effective analytics system, built on solid first principles and clear KPIs, to drive your business forward.
Dashboard Definition
Using our newly defined First Principles and KPIs, we envision the dream dashboards that will help us measure progress effectively. These dashboards are designed to provide clear, actionable insights and may include some data that isn’t currently being tracked. By defining these dashboards now, we ensure that our data collection and analytics efforts are aligned with your ultimate goals.
Crucially, these dashboards will not include any information that doesn't lead to a decision or change of course. Startups can easily get bogged down by “data TMI” (too much information), which leads to analysis paralysis. Our goal is to keep dashboards lean and high-impact, focusing only on the metrics that drive meaningful action. This streamlined approach helps ensure that your team remains focused on the most critical data, empowering you to make informed decisions swiftly and confidently.
Data Inventory & Assessment
In this crucial step, we conduct a thorough Data Inventory & Assessment. First, I get access to all your data sources to see how things are structured and what is currently being collected. This involves diving into your databases, analytics platforms, CRM systems, and any other tools where your data resides.
Next, I compare this existing data landscape to the KPIs, Data Dictionary, and Dashboard Definitions we established earlier. This comparison helps us identify where we’re missing vital information and understand the gaps in your data collection. By pinpointing these gaps, we can ensure that all necessary data is being tracked (or will be tracked) and that our analytics system will be comprehensive and aligned with your business objectives today and tomorrow. This step is essential for creating a robust and reliable foundation for all future data analysis and reporting efforts.
Data Instrumentation
Once we've identified any gaps in your current tracking, we move on to Data Instrumentation. In this phase, I outline a comprehensive tracking plan to be delivered to your engineering team. This plan details how to instrument important business and customer events that were not previously tracked, ensuring that all critical data points are captured.
Often, this involves setting up a new event tracking system, such as Segment.com, or aggregating data from various sources like your email system into an analytics database. By implementing these systems, we can capture a holistic view of customer interactions and business operations.
Additionally, I ensure that all data is aggregated into a centralized repository. This centralization allows for cross-system analysis, enabling you to derive insights from a comprehensive, unified dataset. This step is crucial for creating a seamless and efficient analytics process, giving you an end-to-end picture of your customers’ journies and allowing you to make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Custom Analytics System Design & Development
In this critical phase, I use DBT (Data Build Tool), a cutting-edge data transformation technology, to create a custom data application tailored to your business needs. This step is essential for transforming scattered data into coherent, actionable insights.
Further Reading: Why Your Startup Needs a DBT Data App
Production databases and analytics systems often store fragments of the full customer view in various locations—like an auto manufacturer storing car parts. Pistons are in one place, steering wheels in another, and wheels in a third. However, business users have questions about complete cars, not individual parts. By leveraging a modern data transformation tool like DBT, we can reassemble these parts into complete stories that align with the way business users ask questions.
Additionally, using DBT allows us to hard-code the definitions of key KPIs and metrics into the analytics application's logic. This standardization eliminates the risk of different reports returning varied answers due to inconsistent query strategies—a common issue in startups.
The result of this phase is an analytics database with potentially hundreds of rows of roll-up data about each customer, providing a detailed and holistic view. This comprehensive data structure ensures that your team has the information they need to make informed, data-driven decisions that drive growth and efficiency.
Dashboard & Reporting Setup
Using a powerful business intelligence tool such as Looker or Metabase, we build out the reports outlined in our Dashboard Plan. These tools allow us to create dynamic, interactive dashboards that provide real-time insights into your key metrics and performance indicators. Our goal is to ensure that the dashboards are not only visually appealing but also highly functional, enabling your team to easily interpret and act on the data. By leveraging these advanced visualization tools, we transform raw data into clear, actionable insights that support informed decision-making and drive business success.
Insights start to emerge. As time goes on, new dashboards can be built out of the raw materials developed in the Customer Analytics System Development stage.
Data Insight Evaluation (The "Aha!" Moments)
Now comes the fun part: we start using the system. Together, we review the dashboards and compare them to your previous understandings and assumptions. This hands-on evaluation allows us to see how the new data insights align with or challenge your existing strategies.
As we explore the dashboards, we discuss how your strategy may need to be adjusted based on the newly available insights. This collaborative review ensures that you can effectively leverage the data to make informed, strategic decisions that drive your business forward. By continuously evaluating and refining our approach, we ensure that the analytics system remains aligned with your evolving business needs and goals.
Training & Implementation
At this point, not only have we built you a power analytics tool that allows you to answer tough questions, but we’ve also built a system that your entire organization can use themselves. I ensure that you and your team are fully equipped to make the most of your new custom data system. I provide comprehensive training sessions, teaching you how to self-serve and navigate the system to answer questions as they arise in real-time. This hands-on training empowers your team to independently access and interpret the data, fostering a data-driven culture within your organization.
By the end of this phase, your team will be confident in using the system to generate insights and make informed decisions, ensuring long-term success and self-sufficiency.
Ongoing Support, Analytics Review and Optimization
As your business evolves, backend systems change, and technology improves, you may have new data to track or need integrations updated. We will work together on an ongoing basis to ensure that your system continues to contain all the insights you need and is performing correctly. Regularly, we will meet to review current analytics performance, providing guidance and identifying any untracked dimensions of your business that could lead to deeper understanding. This continuous support and optimization ensure that your analytics system remains robust, up-to-date, and aligned with your business objectives, helping you stay ahead of the curve and make data-driven decisions with confidence.
Further Reading: Why Your Startup Needs a DBT Data App *NOW*