If you think you don't need analytics, you do need analytics!

I've lately spoken to a large number of early stage startups to see, and understand on how they build their ideas to execution, and product. Every conversation has been a learning experience and has only given me better perspective on technology, business and life.

A few common traits that I observed on all of the founders was the great emphasis on the pace of execution, the zeal and passion in how they talked, a detailed understanding of their customer, and depth of why they're trying to solve the problem that they're solving; traits that excite me to bits!

But there was another common trait that I noticed when I went a little deeper in the conversations was that the emphasis on analytics in most of the startups was minimal; which was alarming, but not surprising for me. Most of the founders, though broadly know that they need the analytics in place in their product, but don't put it to execution. But wait, why is that so?

1. Because we don't exactly understand how getting the product analytics in place is going to impact the business, and hence the ROI doesn't seem worth it. It isn't the founders to blame either; before working in Product, it didn't intuitively occur to me either that just improving the positioning of a call to action would actually improve business.
2. Because viewing the numbers, learning the analytics tools is a job of patience. Because getting those events in place, and trying to drive conclusions can at times take time and practice.
3. Because getting traffic/building traction is subconsciously more important to us than engaging, and converting the ones that have landed on our product.

But why should one spend time on doing the analytics?

It's the cheapest means to building better business right from the start

Let me give you an example here. Let's say you're an e-commerce company that sells products in various parts of India. You probably know that the maximum traffic comes to you from Kerala, you know this data.

But your drop down which asks for the user city/state shows Kerala in the 7th - 8th position. You've just added extra friction for that Kerala user before he could even move to see your product; just by hard coding the top 3-4 traffic/searched cities, your business could have increased significantly.

Now say user finally does the search successfully, but the load time of the page is so slow that the user doesn't actually reach your product page, which is your actual offering. There can be a gazillion examples like these, but we don't spend time recognizing them.

It's objective

We all have our biases in who, and how are customer is and we build our product basis that. Doing so in the first attempt, but iterating on your product just by this understanding isn't the right approach, which is what I observed a lot of startups do.

Taking the previous example, the founder had a bias that users from North India, primarily Delhi are more likely to make a purchase from his e-commerce product, which later turned out that Kerala visitors used the product more.

Disassociating your association with the bias is what data helps you do.

It's time saving!

Though it's absolutely important to understand your costumer, speaking to them on a regular basis, analytics is probably the quickest means to understand how your user is interacting with the product! It helps you take product and business decisions quicker, saves you time and hence saves you money. Your time is expensive afterall :)

So as founders, the number of users going deeper in your product funnel should be just as important as tracking those GMV/install numbers. Spend time reading, and understanding them!