Small and medium businesses are awful at data-based decisions: not for lack of data, but because using it well is genuinely hard.
The Hypothesis
Tech businesses make decisions on gut instinct even when they have the data to make informed choices, because:
- It’s hard to get the data to the right place at the right time
- It’s hard to frame the right question to ask your data, so people can’t (and usually shouldn’t) trust the answers it gives
- Operationalising decisions based on insights takes real engineering effort
- Off-the-shelf tools are expensive and need serious time and knowledge to set up well
- Those same tools give you enough rope to hang yourself, without the skills to use it
The Product
Insights-as-a-service sitting on top of a customer’s own event data: integrate the scattered sources into one coherent view, interpret trends into actionable advice, answer plain-language questions about the data, and surface what’s likely coming next, at a price an early-stage startup could actually afford.
I built it solo across roughly eight months between AirRobe and Atlassian: the entire product stack, plus the branding, marketing and SEO around it.
Where It Landed
Parked. It hadn’t reached paying customers when a Principal Engineer role at Atlassian came calling, and that was the right move at the time.
Simplytics itself lives on, though: these days it’s the home of Spritz.
Learnings compound, even when ventures don’t.