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

Post was originally published in October 2019, updated for relevancy in September 2021 + August 2023

You'd like to stay lean and scale, but how? What's the next step you need to take? Let your customers tell you -- through their data.

You can't get insights from data you didn't collect. It's less important about where you're storing the data and more about what you are -- and aren't. This is because we can use the data to calculate metrics (or 1-number summaries) that tell us what's happening in our complex business, and when tracked over time, can tell us how we're doing in terms of product market fit -- and where can we improve.

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 (legally and ethically) track across your platform/hardware/service and your customers, timestamped at the individual event level:

"Demographics" of the customer's/IoT device (e.g. Android/iPhone, tablet, desktop, hardware type),
Your app's/platform's "demographics" (e.g. release 0.9.3, pricing plan(s)),
State(s) of the app's/platform's assets (e.g. inventory, sensor(s)),
Interactions of all of the above, and
Touch-points (e.g. acquisition channels, marketing emails, customer service interactions, sensor maintenance),

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

Ways to improve product market fit through product led growth?
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;
Create an omni-channel experience for your customers;
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.

To help you benchmark your product-market-fit by checking that you’re capturing everything about your business, schedule a flat-fee data strategy assessment.

Keywords: Product strategy, data products, customer understanding, customer acquisition, CAC, retention.

*Data quality permitting