Your goal should not be to get me to spend more time in your data product
I want your data product to do the work for me
Engagement/ time in app is often seen as the holy grail for consumer, as well as many and b2b apps and products. I get it; we only have so many hours in the day and you want some of mine. On the surface this is reasonable. But as someone who gets pitched so many data products, tries some and buys very few, I can tell you that I am very rarely looking for a product in which my team can spend a lot of time. We spend a lot of time in Hex and Hashboard, we build dbt models, use Airflow, we want to use Modal more,1 and there’s some Databricks. There’s very little we can’t do w/ this stack.
So when someone comes to me with a new tool, it has to bring a TON of value. You’re competing against a talented team, but more importantly, sticky tools that we already know how to do a lot with. This is especially true if your tool requires me to learn anything net new: the value that the tool brings has to be immense to compensate.2,3
More often than not, I see tools that just take too much work relative to value. Here’s what I want instead:
I want your data product to do the work for me.
I want your data product to take my data and push me relevant metrics, insights and alerts, ideally via Slack. You want to help me understand and optimize cloud spend? You offer log-based threat detection or anomaly detection? Prove yourself! I’ll give you data access, and your data product should tell me what is in my spend or logs, when and why I should care, and maybe even what I should do about it. Your data product should ask for my feedback on next steps. It should make me feel like I have someone working next to me.
A few years ago this would have sounded pretty crazy, but advances in llms make this much more possible: parsing through logs and identifying patterns, outliers, risk? Seems doable. Monitoring cloud spend and looking for anomalies? Come on. So please please please, I don’t need any more “ask the llm a data question” products. I need more “we’ll do the work for you, hop on” products.
Disclosure: I am an angel investor in Modal.
If you have a learning curve, make it less steep with templates, easy starts, guides. Take the wheel, I don’t care, just do whatever it takes for me to see what makes your tool so special. When done well this is a game changer.