Especially in 2022, there is more competition than ever when it comes to starting and launching a business. The first year of a startup’s life is one of the most difficult, forcing founders to strive for solutions that can help them weather the storm. Considering that companies that are data-driven are 23x more likely to acquire new customers, investing in data infrastructure is one of the best early strategies that you can opt for.
At present, there are over 70,000 startups launched in the United States every single year. Across all industries, you need every advantage you can get. By converting your business into one that’s led, guided, and shaped by data, you’re able to boost productivity, streamline operations, and increase revenue.
In this article, we’ll turn to data infrastructure, demonstrate which areas should be your primary focus, and explain why data drives progress for startups.
How Can Data Boost the Success of My Startup?
Data covers every aspect of the public’s interaction with your company. From sales and eCommerce information to interactions with your website and even information on what kinds of people compose your audience, data can reveal it all.
There are a number of ways that startups can use data in order to streamline their business:
- Decision-Making – In the early days of starting a business, there are going to be a lot of decisions to be made. While this can seem overwhelming for many founders, data can provide clarity in almost any situation. Instead of making emotional decisions, founders can look toward data and forecasting to see which decision is the most profitable for the business. Data can take a huge element of the guesswork out of running a business, giving a startup a much higher chance of success.
- Employee Performance – Across all of your employees, internal data monitoring will allow you to chart performance over an employee’s time at your company. From this, you can quickly identify top performers and focus your resources on them. At a startup, there isn’t much money to go around. Due to this, knowing how best to spend what little starting cash you have can help sustain your business for longer.
- Consumer Analysis – Understanding your customers and then personalizing your marketing strategies is one of the most effective ways of landing new clients. Without data, you’re unable to conduct investigations into who is interested in your brand and what they would like to see.
Data, in all its forms, helps to streamline the early progress of a startup. Without having to worry so much about whether or not something is the right decision, businesses can move toward data as their guiding light.
Beyond the three benefits that we’ve listed, data analysis and monitoring can positively impact your business in many ways. But, to access the very best of what your collected data has to offer, we need to make sure that we have a sturdy data infrastructure in place first.
How To Create a Streamlined Data Infrastructure for your Startup
Creating data infrastructure from scratch isn’t going to be an easy task. But, considering the array of third-party tools that we currently have at our disposal, we’re able to find composite solutions fairly easily. For example, your startup doesn’t have to invest in an on-premise data center right away.
Instead, you can turn to cloud-based data platforms, partnering with a major provider in order to streamline your capturing and storage of data as soon as possible. With complete access and a centralized method of storing data, you’ll be able to defeat data silos in your startup before they ever become a problem.
Beyond your initial architecture, you should also look into moving to real-time data processing and then attempting to remove bottlenecks that are stopping progress.
Create Real-Time Data Processing Capabilities
The key to being able to use data is to make it as visible as possible. If your employees can’t rapidly draw insight from your company data, then it’s not going to be particularly effective. The key here is moving to real-time data processing tools.
Once again, in our age of digital information, there is a range of pre-built structures that you can turn to. From marketing dashboards to sales overview pages and even website data platforms, there are plenty of options you can use.
By integrating your base data infrastructure with analytics workbenches, you can enable real-time analytics for your startup. From there, you can:
- Detect Problems – You’ll be able to see a problem as soon as it arises, not weeks after the fact.
- Notice Trends – With a continual flow of data, you can quickly spot recurring trends and then capitalize on them.
- Run A/B Tests – A continual flow of data means complete visibility over your business. With this, you can run A/B tests and get instant results, helping to increase the conversion rate of your startup from day one.
Real-time analytics are not to be overlooked in a startup!
Reduce Bottlenecks with Modern Data Platform Architecture
As your startup continues to increase its usage and processing of data, you’re going to hit a point where your system can’t handle anymore. Instead of letting this bottleneck derail your business progress, you should look at modern data platform architecture to overcome the problem.
By incorporating a data mesh into your data architecture, your users will be able to access data without having to transport it to a data warehouse or lake. Instead of your data teams having to set up and streamline the process, a data mesh serves to distribute data ownership across all of your teams.
From there, your teams are able to manage company data in a secure, scalable, and accessible way. Instead of hitting bottlenecks, you’ll have made all of your data completely accessible to your team, helping everyone to access data-driven insights and make better decisions.
If you want to decrease the complexity of your data infrastructure without sacrificing, then incorporating a data mesh into your startup is a fantastic way of doing so.
Final Thoughts
If you want your startup to have the best possible chance of success during its first year and beyond, then you need to incorporate data architecture into the daily operations of your business. All of your employees should be familiar with data: how to use it, how to manipulate it, and how to draw meaning from it.
By investing in data infrastructure, you’re able to rapidly boost internal productivity, increase customer satisfaction, and drive your startup toward success.
