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

You've spent money on marketing to get prospects to your door. Do you know who's going inside and what each customer's doing once they get there? Or what your offering looks like on the days that they're on?

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 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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