We decided to stop holding data strategy workshops
Lior Barak ???
Senior Data Strategy Leader | Making Data ROI Simple | Author of 'Data is Like a Plate of Hummus' | Cooking Data Blog
At the end of 2019, I decided to stop holding data strategy workshops. These workshops accounted for 60% of our company's income. Let me tell you why.
It was Yom Kippur 2019, which for me, is the holiest Jewish holiday. As I had done every year for the past 10 years, I sat down and evaluated the path which had led me to where I was that day. I asked myself what went well, what went badly and what I needed to change in order to improve next year.
I soon got to thinking about our business, Tale About Data, and I quickly realized that there was one main thing I wasn't happy with. Our Data Discovery Workshop. Yes that's right, our bestselling workshop. So why wasn't I happy with it?
I couldn't help but notice that once each workshop had ended, individuals would pick up the paper, take it away and transform it into reality. I began asking, is it enough to simply deliver a canvas and go? We were traveling around the world and meeting great companies, but very few were taking the development service we offered. I must admit, we weren’t cheap – the service needed to be built from scratch each time.
It was then that we realized something that would be crucial to our future. We needed to change our entire approach and develop a product – a full service that would encourage different companies, small or large, to partner with us. This was about more than money; it was about giving our clients the competitive edge data can offer.
Looking back at our plan for last year, perhaps we were too quick off the mark, especially with Coronavirus having such a significant impact on everything. However, we strongly believed that we needed to do things differently, and what better place to start than taking our workshop down from the shelf, giving it a dust off and embedding it into an incredible new product.
This product would contain everything the workshop had to offer, but it would also provide the tools needed to implement the workshop's outcomes. It would also be a more affordable solution for companies without big budgets.
Our new product would allow us to put our clients' users at the heart of the decision-making process, helping to establish which features work and which don't. By gaining an understanding of the marketing acquisition and retention process, the product could be a great fit. There would be no CPI, CPO, CPS, CPM MAUS or DAUS, but instead, the product would offer a clear understanding of each returning user's value, what they bring and how they support the business' growth.
The pandemic arrived and we lost clients. We had no choice but to make adjustments, just like every other small business. But all that time, we had a major goal in mind: to offer our clients a product that they could use to make decisions based on their own product and users. We would help them find that pivotal point where the product and user come together, encouraging more users to join and move into a better exploration mode with new features and campaigns.
And so Lake Side was born – a dynamic solution inspired by our data strategy workshop. Now, we are not only offering you a fun and entertaining experience – because let's face it, we all know that workshops are enjoyable as well as educational – but a few weeks after the workshop, you will receive a full infrastructure that helps you to collect, store, process and visualize your data in a way that is fully compliant with ePrivacy laws. Lake Side offers the tools you need to transform from a data-driven organization to one that is data-centric.
With the recent changes that Apple has announced for device IDs and the new developments with Google concerning third-party cookies, the truth is that you are facing a whole new reality. You'll need to start focussing more on the creatives and 1:1 user communication, and the only way to do so is by keeping your data in-house and not sharing it with third parties unless you really need to.
We added new partners to our company bringing knowledge in ePrivacy laws, server optimization and machine learning now we are full and ready to launch "Tale About Data 2.0"
Yom Kippur 2020 has just passed and I am feeling much more comfortable with the route we are on. Deciding to partner with companies to support their data growth is so fulfilling. Our progress has saved me from the many sleepless nights I spent plotting how we could save Tale About Data and put it back on the right track.
