McCandless Consulting LLC

Entrepreneurial Accelerator Program, thanks for supporting entrepreneurs in our region and thanks for welcoming me to your podcast. Quentin Durr, thanks for introducing me to the champions at EAP. Your LinkedIn tagline is spot on: 'connecting businesses to resources.' Tune in at the link below. Fast forward to 19:14 to hear David Smith's great question - what's the one piece of advice I'd give business owners about their data - and my answer. https://lnkd.in/gnxwqJue

I love how Y42 has their roadmap in public. I'm most excited re: Python Sensors. What's the feature you're most excited about on the roadmap? You can get to it from link below or Y42.com > Company > Roadmap. https://lnkd.in/gFzc-DFK

Are you part of a business using Stripe and want more answers out of your Stripe data? I’ve got good news. Stripe is one of the easiest systems to extract data from. Just look at this catalog of connectors. Stripe leads the pack in # of connectors at 14. https://lnkd.in/gcs9KYSv Personally - of the 30+ source systems from which I’ve built data pipelines, Stripe is among the top 3 easiest to get data out of and work with. I would also put Salesforce in the top 3 - I love the ability to write SOQL. If you’re keen to use an AWS Redshift or Snowflake data warehouse, Stripe has their own ‘easy button’ to load your Stripe data into your data warehouse. They even include their own AI assistant to help you write queries. Note - the cost is 3 cents per transaction on Stripe. https://lnkd.in/g_Z52mSE If you want to avoid that cost or you’re not on AWS Redshift or Snowflake, you can use Fivetran to extract from Stripe to almost any database under the sun. Fivetran gives you up to 500k records/month free. You’ve got to be doing some serious volume on Stripe before you get close to paying for Fivetran. Stripe has a fantastic dashboard showing high level metrics e.g. MRR over time, churn. However, if you want to dig deeper - say analyze MRR over time by segment (which lives in your CRM), the Stripe dashboard can't help you with that. At that point, building a data pipeline out of Stripe might make sense. If you’ve got questions about how to get answers out of your Stripe data, please comment below or DM me. Happy to share my experience. Source systems from which I've built data pipelines: https://lnkd.in/gz5BZ6sD #stripe #data

The Data Stack Show podcast, thanks for hosting me last week and asking some great questions about my experience with Amazon's unique culture + my experience there in a realm of analytics that I perceive most businesses neglect: time series forecasting/capacity planning/workforce management. This realm has been around and offered smart businesses low hanging fruit galore for decades. In this podcast I talk about how my team at Amazon used these kinds of analytics to maintain high standards for both customer experience and efficiency. Check out the show at https://lnkd.in/gvkjxDRH Thanks for sponsoring the show, RudderStack. Thanks for hosting, John Wessel and Eric Dodds, and thanks for producing Brooks Patterson. To some of my former teammates at Amazon - thanks for all you taught me about this area of analytics and your superhero efforts to raise the bar for our customers' experiences - Raminder S., Matt Clark, Fabian Chaverri, Chris Kalisiak, Ankit Verma, Jadé Dieteren, Ben White and Federico Francone.

Did you know the Bible has lessons about the challenges of delivering results with data? In a recent live between Benjamin Rogojan and Gu Xie, Gu explains how the pinnacle of data is generative AI, but it’s like climbing Mount Everest. https://lnkd.in/gkfqYd9W The Bible has a parallel anecdote for our learning: in Genesis 11 (https://lnkd.in/gEgk2ijz), mankind takes advantage of the unity of one language and decides to build the Tower of Babel, that would reach the sky. So, what stopped them? They were united in building for the wrong reason: "We’ll make a name for ourselves v4" What happened? “5But the?Lord?came down to see the city and the tower the people were building.?6He said, “All these people are united and speak the same language. That is why they can do all this. Now they will be able to do anything they plan.?7Come on! Let us go down and mix up their language. Then they will not be able to understand one another.” 8So the?Lord?scattered them from there over the whole earth. And they stopped building the city.” By the way, check out this story for an example of God blessing unity for the right reasons - the opposite of Babel: https://lnkd.in/gpRQ_q27 If your business has ambitions to climb the Mount Everest of delivering results with data, learn from the builders of the Tower of Babel: when a team is ‘united and speak[s] the same language…. They will be able to do anything they plan.’ (v6) That unity doesn’t happen on its own. Even if a business starts their data journey on the right footing, a lack of hard and soft lines in place will yield a really big, expensive half-baked project like Babel: “Then they will not be able to understand one another… And they stopped building the city.”?v7-8 If you were going to climb Mount Everest, how long do you think it would take you to do it yourself (e.g. read books, blogs) vs. hiring a seasoned guide/coach to help you? In 2024 I’ve enjoyed helping multiple ambitious clients start building out their data workshop, setting up these hard and soft lines to maintain unity. Example hard line: Vendors and solutions crowd the data landscape - they don't all 'speak the same language.’ I’ve helped clients avoid the pitfall of selecting a data warehouse and a data visualization platform that do NOT play nicely together. You won't find these harsh realities in the vendors' marketing or Gartner Magic Quadrants. Example soft line: What is procedure for creating and sharing a dashboard? How do we find harmony in speed to insight/self-service with duplicating sources of truth? Apart from helping clients avoid suffering down the road, one of the most fun parts of these projects is shaving months off the time to insight. I’ve helped clients select solutions in 3 days. On the other hand, I have customers who lacked a guide when starting and they spent months spinning their wheels. Those delays have an opportunity cost.