Data log files: Recent Episodes

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At the moment it feels a bit like an ambitious experiment where I try how much stuff I can load into my brain. Until it asks for a break. A lot of new stuff is coming up for me at the moment: - first employees in the agency - interesting new projects coming up - inventing new ways to scale GTM setups - plenty of content ideas - plenty of code ideas - even product ideas (but I try to ignore them).

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Long time no see...

It's 2022 - ok, already for over two months. Time to update and pick up the podcast again.

I stopped working on datatasks and mind the docs and doing a full focus on my deepskydata agency.

What? Why are doing this? It's so much cooler to build products than agencies.

Wait a bit, I have a special take how I build an agency - it's a lot product development involved

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How to define a data product?

Not that easy I have to say. And also I am not so good with definition. So I give more an explanation how I see data products and what makes them different compared to for example dashboards.

My definition right now:
Data products help to solve problems with data.

I will talk a lot about the problem part of this definition.

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So, here is the recap:
- Why writing about building was much better than expected but still can better
- What went wrong with the dev setup for Datatasks
- What kind of learnings I take with me for the next months

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Startups know this phenomena as well. In the very early days when there are 4 people sitting in one room the whole time churning away code, ideas and tasks. That changes drastically when the company then grows. The lost in translation problem starts to occur. Context gets missed out, people don't communicate, processes need to be established.

I have my own lost in translation issue with Datatasks. I decided to split up frontend and backend and let the development been done by different persons (for some time including me). For Mind the docs I decided differently and we develop everything with Django. So one dev is responsible for frontend and backend at the same time. Works 100% better. So learning for me, focus resources so no lost in translation happens in the first place. That something for a later stage.

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It's not that I did not made some progress. But in the main area I want to make progress - the datatasks app. I did some progress in the backend. But in the frontend nada. It's the initial phase where we need to align frontend and backend to finalize the configuration. And this is right now pretty asynchronous back and forth. This needs to change.

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For my "Mind the docs" product I planned to do the full development. I don't have the budget to have two dev people working on my two products at the moment.

And with this decision I was again tinkering how I should approach the dev setup for Mind the docs. And this was a good indicator for me to investigate a bit deeper what kind of tasks work good for me (where I can excel) and which ones block me.

Spoiler: For development the frontend part is definitely a blocker - so outsourcing at least HTML & CSS is a must for me if I don't want to end up in a demotivated state. 

And you will also hear why I will go back to my Django roots.

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I am announcing my second product: mind the docs - https://www.mindthedocs.app/

It's basically coming from datatasks where I was initially planning it as a feature but recognized that it does not really fit there. So I already had the idea to make it a stand alone product.

After spending some time on concepts and early wireframes I decided to launch it as my second product (even when the first one is not live yet).

The good thing is that it shares a bunch of code with datatasks and both work neatly with each other.

Here is the official announcement I wrote on Linked In:

🤔 So what is next for data & analytics documentation?

I did a small announcement on Monday and let me do it bigger today 🛠.

Presenting:
Mind the docs - a documentation platform for analytics and data setups

I am trying to build a bridge between great documentation and few time to maintain it - by using assistants that prepare and update parts of the documentation for you automatically.

Registration is open for early access:

https://www.mindthedocs.app/

Because..
Everyone likes great documentations but no one likes to create and maintain them.

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I do data consulting as my major job and currently building datatasks is done during my free-time. Currently most of the work is done by external devs because I am quite occupied by my consulting work. 

So datatasks is making progress even when I don't have time. But it also occupies me from recording updates. 

Now I'm back with an update.

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I was thinking a lot how I should handle the different checks in Datatasks. Simply having a list of different checks for the different analytics platforms?

It didn't click for me. After a lot of thoughts I had the idea to create something like an app store. So basically a checks store. 

Currently I am planning to bundle different the types of checks into a package. So the "Google Analytics Quality" Package. So datatasks users can simply take a package and activate it for their accounts.

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The question of a free plan is following me through my Saas journey for now 10 years. Do I need a free plan or does it attract the wrong people?

I try to break down the question in this episode to figure out what are situations where a free plan can help you a lot. And where it does not make sense.

For me a Free plan is a marketing channel and therefore treated like one and not as part of the product.

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I had a real low on Saturday

From time to time I have days where my inner voice tells me - all this stuff will not work out.

My product will fail, projects will fail and are you sure what you are doing at the moment.

I learned to handle these days. In the past they caused me to stop working on things, disbanding ideas.

Today I know they will pass. They are just the lows on the wave curves. So I try to use them and note down the things I am most sceptical on these days and review them later.

In the podcast episode I speak about the low phases and how I learned to handle them.

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Let me tell me a story....

This is a huge trigger for me, when someone is starting like this. I love stories. Can't wait to hear a new one. And usually a story is never boring. It's authentic to the core.

Listening to Dave Gerhardt's podcasts with April Dunford - they mentioned how powerful a story about "how the company was started and why" can be to let your customers understand your mission.

In this episode I try to tell the story of datatasks. It's starts a bit lame but gets a lot better to the end. It was a good session for me to figure out what kind of story makes sense to tell.

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One thing I learned in building products is to always question the core of your product and if you need a feature.

Each feature initially decreases the user experience. First it adds only complexity (for the UX and for development). So the benefits of the feature have to be significantly higher to justify the added complexity. That is why I became very rigid to decide if a feature should be added.

When I was talking about datatasks with other people I recognized that two features I had planned needed more explanations. Especially why they are in datatasks. 

So I decided to remove them (and eventually build own products with them at the core).

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The zero episode explains what this podcast is about and sets some expectation about the production and style of the episodes:

• it's a journal - so I capture my thoughts and decisions about building datatasks along the building it

• it's raw - as a journal I want to produce quickly and instantly - so no big editing involved (audio gets optimized, but no music, no effects,..)

• it's about brain dumps - I talk about stuff I am thinking about - so I can loose myself or take some turns not planned - I basically dump what I am thinking about