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[Co-founder here of a start-up that provided monitoring / metadata analytics for cloud warehouses] My unsolicited $0.02 - I think your approach is spot on. As
by scapecast 6y ago
[Co-founder here of a start-up that provided monitoring / metadata analytics for cloud warehouses]
My unsolicited $0.02 - I think your approach is spot on.
As a company, you will never have one consistent data set and metrics if you keep building an individual model for each user / use case / etc. And I've seen the explosion of tables and models in real-time. They just keep growing. And how do you even know that the question you're asking in your dashboard is pulling the information from the correct table? I've yet to see a data team that didn't have to deal with drift. Plus, there's a real cost of storing all these stale tables that nobody is looking at anymore.
What your product is doing is what I see companies already trying to accomplish themselves [somewhat]. For the leading companies when it comes to working with data, the warehouse today is already the source of truth, with one dimension table that points back to the SaaS tool / dashboard via an S3 bucket. So the SaaS tool itself is really only the last mile and visualization layer. Run the model, create the table, offload the table to S3, point the tool to the S3 bucket with the table. Update every 4 hours, etc.
dbt wins in that world. (and I assume you're using something like dbt under the hood of narrator.ai?)
That approach is already commoditizing the SaaS tool down to the visualization layer and the opinionated way of displaying data. But that still means there's at least one model per tool, use case, etc. with one table - and you still don't see the entire journey of the user, that's something you either have to create for a single specific use case, or cobble it together ad-hoc. If instead you have one table that has it all - you can move soooo much faster with data, and take out all the friction that comes from having disparate data sets.
narrator.ai wins in that world.
Blinkist is Berlin is following a very similar approach to what you guys have built. This deck is a few years old, but I think the approach described will resonate with you:
https://www.slideshare.net/SebastianSchleicher/tracking-and-business-intelligence https://www.slideshare.net/SebastianSchleicher/tracking-and-...
If I had to look into my Crystal Ball, I think one of your GTM challenges will be to convince existing data teams that everything they've built is somewhat redundant. On the flipside, I can see the same data teams say "OMG, finally!". I'm curious to hear the customer reactions so far.
I'm very excited about this product! I wouldn't be a direct user with my current role, but FWIW, I can share the bruises I got from working in this market.
Would love to hear more!
- ahmedNarrator 6y agoThis is so great! You see exactly what we see and clearly you have shared similar experiences with dashboards not matching because of wrong table. (The good old "spent 3 weeks debugging an analysis using sales_data and then finally found that sales_data_v2 was built to solve it). Yeah we do something very similar to dbt for taking restructuring the data into a single time-series table. We add things like identity resolution, diffing, incremental update and computing some cache columns. Your Crystal Ball is SPOT ON!!! We get 3 kinds of data people. The ones who are like: "THIS WILL NEVER WORK", "Too bad I already built all this" or the "THIS IS THE FUTURE, HOW IS EVERYONE NOT USING IT". I would love to chat and show you what we have (schedule a demo on our site and it will go to me and we can chat!) Also, Teaser... When you standardize all of data and you create a consistent way to relating that standardized structure then analysis become very consistent. Imagine a world where your email attribution deep dive can be run by loading a template and point it to your "opened email" activity and your "order activity".... coming soon ... a Narrative Library.
- scapecast 6y agoscheduled!
- chrisjc 6y ago> restructuring the data into a single time-series table. We add things like identity resolution, diffing, incremental update So is this where the customer still has to do some work? Defining states and transforming their sources into a series of events with these states?
- cedricd 6y agoYes, the customer would have to define their activities (e.g. 'page view', 'completed order', 'support ticket opened') and write sql snippets to define them. https://docs.narrator.ai/docs/activity-transformations https://docs.narrator.ai/docs/activity-transformations describes these scripts and links to a few examples
- theboat 6y ago