5 Aspects of your Business you Need to Track Today to make any Data-Driven Decisions

After 10 years of collaborating with companies of all shapes, sizes and industries, I've found that all aspects of your business fall into just 5 attributes that you should track about your platform/hardware/service and your customers, timestamped at the individual event level:

  1. "Demographics" of the customer's/IoT device (e.g. Android/iPhone, tablet, desktop, hardware type),

  2. Your app's/platform's "demographics" (e.g. release 0.9.3, pricing plan(s)),

  3. State(s) of the app's/platform's assets (e.g. inventory, sensor(s)),

  4. Interactions of all of the above, and

  5. Touch-points (e.g. acquisition channels, marketing emails, customer service interactions, sensor maintenance),

By tracking these 5 attributes, you'll be able to answer virtually any question about your business -- about the past, present and future. These include:

  • Ways to improve product market fit?

  • Who's on the platform right now? And how are they using the product?

  • Quantifying CAC to fine-tune your customer acquisition and retention strategies, based on:

    • who your high-profit customers are and how they found you,

    • what their purchase triggers are,

    • where they're coming from, and

    • what keeps them coming back;

  • Track how your offering has changed over time, what it looked like at a given point in time, and how that impacted the business;

  • Identify best- and under-performing product features, to help prioritize development;

  • Identify anomalies;

  • ... and many more.

If you'd like more support in completing this self-assessment, or would like to talk more about how you can improve your product market fit -- please reach out.


Keywords: Data strategy, customer acquisition, CAC, retention. customer understanding, Internet of Things (IoT) sensors, data products

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