Quick Fix #4: Paying Off Your Analytical Debt: Asia Orangio - MicroConf Remote

0:00[Music] hello hello okay my name is asia and i am the ceo and founder of demand maven and the question is what's a quick fix that you can implement now in order to make your business way easier to run in the future and hands down i have to say it's paying off your analytics debt today right now if you possibly can what is analytics debt well it's actually based off of a term that you might actually already know especially if you're a technical founder or a co-founder you might have heard of technical debt or code debt which basically just means as you implement certain parts of your

0:35product there's going to be certain parts of the code base and even just certain investments technology wise that over time prevent you from growing in some kind of way it could also just be impacting overall operations the code base isn't as efficient especially as the product and the business grows and matures especially so as you start making certain decisions about how certain features are implemented how certain things are coded and also how certain parts of the platform again are implemented you over time just naturally incur this technical debt you'll have to naturally start making decisions about if you tackle rebuilding certain parts of your product or

1:13even replacing certain technologies and also what's just kind of okay to kind of turn a blind eye to for now but knowing that you'll get to it and fix it or replace it in the next six months could even be up to several years and not all technical debt is necessarily bad debt you naturally incur it it's really up to you the founders the engineering team and then of course the product team to decide what makes more sense to tackle now versus later but as long as you are aware of the choices that you make and also the choices that you don't make that's that's what uh that's what

1:45technical debt is all about and analytics debt is the same exact concept except it's applied specifically to your analytics it might sound really shocking but there's actually businesses out there right now today who have reached 20k number r or 50k number r and they have no idea what the top channels are that contribute to overall marketing growth or just overall acquisition they have no idea what the top features are that someone needs to execute in order to most likely become a paying customer there's there's so much from acquisition to activation to retention that is relatively unknown and part of this is because there's no overall analytics strategy or plan in

2:27order to really figure out how to measure the ultimate things that you need to measure in order to make good decisions and on top of that the interesting part about analytics debt is that it really starts from day one it really starts from day one building the product and then of course launching it going to market with a product and deciding what are the features and just customer segments that we need to be able to measure and what how do certain cohorts over time perform and analytics that is uh it's extremely common and i work with early stage sas companies on reaching those very first growth

3:02milestones and i've got to say it's an extremely common thing it's very normal if you are experiencing analytics debt in any kind of way right now let me just say that it's absolutely normal but i will also encourage you to pay it off now if you can you don't want to get to 15k mrr or even 30k number r honestly even 10k number are and have zero idea about where those customers came from how they found you and the cool part about analytics debt is that you can technically start now with really simple really simple tools even free tools so google analytics is probably one of the most common

3:36analytics tools that you can use to measure overall marketing performance so how does the website perform how does certain channels perform what what is the overall behavior just from traffic it could also just be demos if you're more of a demo model versus a free trial model how does overall marketing perform and then you can also get into much more complex platforms over time like full story or amplitude or mix panel heap and start looking more at product specific analytics so how do certain cohorts behave in the product how do certain customer segments convert in the product based off of where you've acquired them from and also what are

4:13just the most important behaviors to become a paying customer these are questions that you don't want to go too long not knowing the answer to it's so critical to pay it off now if you can because the interest can actually set you back entire years especially if you get to a certain growth point growth gets stagnant and again you have no idea how to troubleshoot it you have no idea where everything comes from there's really three kinds of analytics that i've identified uh and and there's i'm sure there's certainly more but the most common ones hands down are product analytics marketing analytics and of course business analytics

4:47product analytics i mentioned a few platforms already but you can look at things like uh even uh user list there's also mixed panel amplitude and then of course there's marketing analytics some of the most common platforms have to do more with attribution and then of course just overall website performance google analytics i would say is extremely common to start with and then layering on complexity over time using tools like maybe a hubspot or um it really just depends of course on your business from there and then lastly there's business analytics just very simple metrics and kpis like lifetime value or average revenue per user uh how long

5:24does a particular cohort stay with you of customers and what is the overall retention after six months 12 months being able to answer those questions with like a subscription metrics platform something like profit well or bare metrics or chart mogul and again like this this tackles more maybe more of the subscription side and then at the end of the day especially if you are technical you can of course leverage your own database of information to pull whatever number of reports you need to pull but just make sure that you actually can and make sure also that you have a plan for thinking about what are some of the

5:58unknowns in your business today and then start figuring out like what are the tasks that we need to define so that we can start tackling that this is my quick fix i really hope that was helpful pay off your analytics debt now if you can you again you just you don't want to get too long or too far into your growth process not knowing certain answers so if you can tackle them now do it if you have the means to do it and you don't have to become super complex from day one like i said you can use something simple like google analytics and layer on complexity over time

6:27but you really want to be able to answer some of those fundamental questions thanks again have a good one [Music]