As the founder of a startup whose vision is to use data science to strengthen communities, I am faced with challenges that question my lofty, but heartfelt dreams. Not that they cannot be solved, but it is the time and resources that need to be deployed to pave the way.
Back-Story
To truly boost the local communities, we needed to focus on two high-level influencers, the community members who drive its social well-being and the businesses that drive its economic stability. With our years of collective technology and business experience, we decided to start with the businesses. We rolled out a new and innovative analytics platform that ingests a wide variety of data points, analyzes them and dynamically provides real-time targeted marketing for small businesses. We were proud and excited about what we had and what we were going to empower the businesses with.
Challenges
I love my little community and hence I decided to take this to a few businesses around me for feedback. It doesn’t help that I am Indian and tried the first few cold calls myself. As soon as I started to talk, I either heard a “click” on the other end, or “thank you for calling…click”. At least the second one was polite. I even got a “my wife already does that…click”. I know he was thinking of SEO and Google Analytics, but our platform focused on physical effects and not online. My patience was running out. I guess that’s why I never pursued a career in sales. Others with well received accents tried next, and did better, but nowhere near what we had expected.
Considering what happened in trying to create a focus group, we went back to the drawing board on our sales strategy. There is a lot to blame on the skewed data that I gathered when creating the business plan. Now, here we are, our analysis has presented some very real problems that we need to tackle.
Education
Unless the owners of small businesses are technologically curious and immerse themselves in “future of business” related discussions, they have never heard of the terms big-data and analytics, and if they have, they are not clear on what it is. To us, this means educating them on the topic and its benefits, before we can pitch our own value proposition. This will take time and effort, prolonging our go–to-market plan and raising our customer acquisition costs substantially.
Lack of Time
Most small business owners start their businesses because they are passionate about what they do. They spend most of their time and money focusing on improving their products and services, but end up neglecting other key aspects of the business, including technology and customer experience. Unlike their larger counterparts, they do not have the luxury of delegating functions either. This leads to sustaining or failing businesses rather than growing businesses. Our challenge is in getting them to take time to invest in their growth.
Cost Alignment
Endeavors that involve big-data and analytics cannot be considered low-cost. For us, the cost of storing our ever-growing data lake, processing the data to create insight, the labor for technology development and maintenance, cost of data modeling and all the other expenses that go with any normal business operations are daunting. Adding these up doesn’t align with a price point that many small businesses can afford. We set out with the hope of building a Kia and ended up creating a Cadillac. Unless we can find creative ways to reduce our own costs, our market size will shrink. We will still generate revenue, and have a growing business, but our true mission of empowering the small businesses will miss its mark.
Conclusion
The good news, we knew from the beginning that we were entering uncharted territory, with an emerging technology. We anticipated challenges. It is not that we came this far without hurdles. Every new challenge is a learning experience and we know there are more to come.
Nevertheless, we remain steadfast in our mission and will stay focused on the small business community. I will continue to post additional articles as we maneuver around our current challenges, and face new ones. I only hope that our experiences will help others.