Even the smallest of businesses today is drowning in data. Every software tool that you use has their own reports and getting a big picture view means either:
- Having dozens of tabs open in your browser flipping back and forth trying to make sense of everything in your head
- Or endless copy and pasting and csv exports that all end up in a messy spreadsheet somewhere
And after all of this wasted time, you have to go back and do it again the next day. How much time is wasted just trying to make sense of everything? Or even worse, if you just throw up your hands and give up, what opportunities to grow your business are you missing?
Clearly, trying to do it all with built-in reports just doesn’t cut it, so you need to centralize all of this data somehow. But most of the existing tools and services out there are for sophisticated enterprise clients and their big-time budgets.
Anything else that’s left over:
- Is still expensive
- Breaks all the time
- Limits the different data sources you have access to
- And you still have to do the analysis yourself!
So what other option is there?
We think the small businesses that will win with data are not going to use some point and click SaaS or AI tool. But instead, they will use solutions that are customized to their unique business and have the analysis done for them.
Below we’ll show you how we’re doing that at Dark Seahorses and how we’re making it affordable to even the smallest of businesses.
We used to build data connectors, so we know why they don’t work
We know all about point and click SaaS data platforms (and how they don’t work) because we used to build them. Or at least I used to. Prior to Dark Seahorses, I built a SaaS data connector platform for small, local businesses.
The idea was great in theory: small businesses can link all their accounts and automatically move their data directly into Google Looker Studio. Then they can see all their data in one place with no code required.
But what happened?
Everyone uses slightly different software tools, so it’s impossible to cover all of the different sources that everyone needs. As a small business, you end up with connectors from 3 or 4 different companies, each one with a different login and a different process for linking accounts. Then you have to think about the pricing and how that adds up and keep track of all the subscriptions, invoices and payments.
Finally, once you get your data into Looker Studio, you still have to build the dashboards and do the analysis. We would build dashboard templates to help with that, but only for the connectors that we offered. Once users were mixing and matching connectors, they were stuck trying to figure things out on their own.
And on top of that, you needed to be familiar with Looker Studio in the first place, which for a lot of small business owners is just not something they have time to learn.
In the end, several clients came to me and asked:
"Can't you just do this for me?"
To get the most out of your data, you need customization
In the end, I’ve come to believe that off the shelf data products aren’t the answer. Every business is just different enough to bump up against the edges of standard, cookie-cutter solutions.
That means that there is always going to be some amount of customization involved. Think about the different steps that you need to take if you want to truly make sense of your data and turn it it into an advantage:
- You need to get the data from all your data sources into one place
- Then you need to get that centralized data into some kind of tool you can build reports
- In that tool, you need reports that are going to give you the right information
- And from time to time you need to dig deeper with in-depth analysis
But everyone has slightly different data sources. Everyone wants to see reports in different ways and as your business changes, you are going to want to slice and dice the numbers differently.
That just isn’t possible with a standard connector or dashboarding software.
How we make customization affordable
The problem is that if you wanted to build a customized solution for this yourself, you’d be looking at 3 (expensive) full-time employees:
- A data engineer - for bringing all the data together
- A data visualization analyst - for building the reports
- A data scientist - for in-depth analysis
While that might be fine for big companies, we know that small businesses need to get this done for less than the cost of a single full-time employee. Much less.
That’s what we do at Dark Seahorses. We provide you all of those data services at one predictable monthly price that is a fraction of what you would pay for a full-time employee. We can do that since we are splitting the work across lots of different small businesses that also don’t need a dedicated full-time employee.
Additionally, our team is based in Greece, which offers the advantage of great technical talent with high levels of English, at a much lower cost of living than most Western countries.
See what opportunities we can find in your data
If you’re not looking at all of your business’s data together in one place, you’re missing out on opportunities. Don’t miss out on growth that could secure the future of your business or take you to the next level just because you feel overwhelmed by your data.
Schedule a free consultation with us and we’ll give you the roadmap that we’d follow to turn your data into growth. And as part of this, we’ll give you up-front, transparent pricing that you can actually afford.
Let us show you what opportunities we can find in your data.