Using Data Effectively To Scale Your Start Up w/ Candice Ren | 173TECH

00:00
Candice Ren
As a founder, the gut feeling is what made you a founder. Right. You know, youhave this inkling or from your experience, this is something that's going tosucceed. Don't let data replace that gut feeling. Let that validate it. Soalways follow your gut feeling. In the off chance you have a bad gut feeling,don't spend six months on it.

00:26
Anshika Arora
Today we're talking all about data. We'll be talking the best ways to siftthrough it and leverage it, as well as how to use qualitative data tocomplement the quantitative data that you collect. I'm so excited to bespeaking to Candace Ren, who is the founder of 173Tech helping companies scaleeffectively with data. She was also one of the earlier team members at Bumbleand witnessed their entire journey all the way through to their $3 billionexit. I'm Anshika, founder of Eternity, a software design for businessesoperating in the wedding and event sector, and I'm so excited to be hosting theLAB podcast today. Let's get into it. So to start off with why is leveragingdata so important in the first few months of a startup?

01:10
Candice Ren
I guess data is important throughout every stages, but especially at thebeginning because you don't have a lot of resources, everything is tight. Liketime is poor, cash flow is short, so you really need something to give you thatsignal. Are you moving in the right direction? Are you applying all yourlimited resources in the right way? So I guess data serve a different purposeat different stages, but in the early days, those are the reasons why youshould start thinking about it and using it as much as you can.

01:40
Anshika Arora
Yeah. And are there any specific data points that every startup should becapturing? Obviously it becomes really specific to what your business model isand how you generate your revenue. But even overarching is a theme. Is thereanything in particular that all businesses should definitely be doing?

01:56
Candice Ren
So the way we tend to look at it, because we do help a wide range of companies.So from consumer brands all the way to SaaS products. So the key thing is yourcustomer. So at the end of the day, you are serving, you're building a productor a service for an audience. Right. So we always recommend thinking about itas the customer journey. Right. So you want to understand who they are, wherethey're coming from, and once you acquire them, what they are doing. So whatare they using in terms of feature wise? And then that leads to, okay, howoften they're coming back. So if you think about that overall, their journeywith you by steps and then all of a sudden you can start translating them intometrics.

02:39
Candice Ren
So the signups, how many sign up and then acquisition sources do they comefrom, what amount do they come from? If you're spending on marketing channels,do they come from Meta or Google? And then once they come in your conversions.So are they, if you're a subscription model, like are they signing up for atrial and there's a trial convert to subscriptions or if you are premonetization then what are they doing next? So are they dating app, are they,you know, filling in the profile? Then are they going on to swipe people andthey're matching? Really depends on who you are. Like you said the businessmodel, but it is thinking about as if you are the customer and what are thesteps to go through.

03:21
Anshika Arora
And all of that, I think sometimes for startups it can be quite overwhelming.So data overwhelm is definitely a really big piece that you want to avoid. Whatadvice would you give to startups when they start to new data overwhelm?

03:34
Candice Ren
Just be super focused. You really need to know what you are trying to achieveat this moment in time. And some call it a North Star matrix or your growthgoal, whatever you want to call it. But you need to have very clear one thingthat you're aiming for. It could be super simple, like I just want to get to100 signups as quickly as possible.

03:54
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

03:54
Candice Ren
And early stages, you don't have the numbers, doesn't have to super accurate.It's a signal more than you know. When you get to later stage when you'rescaling, then accuracy become a lot more important. But early stage is reallywhat is the number one thing you want to achieve. And then depending on yourbusiness model, can you break that down into the different contributingfactors? So let's say If I want 100 subscriptions and then you need to startthinking about okay, what does that mean for me? So maybe I need to bring in athousand people, assuming 10% will convert to subscription and that will changeas you monitor those two things. But it's really laser sharp focus.

04:35
Candice Ren
Don't try to do everything but start from the top and then drilling it down andthen you realise, okay, I should only focus on couple of few things instead ofeverything under the sun.

04:47
Anshika Arora
I think that's a really good piece of advice because especially as startups,you look at businesses which are much larger and think right, we should beoperating on the same level and collecting the same data. But I love that ideathat you need to be laser focused and I like what you Said there around thesignals is that data can really provide signals. So what signals do you thinkit provides for product market fit and how can you really use your data toleverage that, for example, if you're fundraising?

05:12
Candice Ren
So I guess to achieve product market fit, that is a couple of things. Thatmeans a few things, right? People are willing, people are using your app andthey're willing to pay for it if you're monetizing it. And there's a few waysto look at have you achieved it? Is your acquisition, is it getting easier? Soas you grow, have you achieved a network effect? People start using it, Peoplestart. So you're looking at your composition of how they come into your app.Right. You know, when you release a beta version, typically invite your friendsand family, right. So you see some apps that get to, you know, hundred orthousands of sign ups really quickly, but then they hit a bottleneck. Right.

05:56
Candice Ren
But if they are growing naturally beyond that point, you start thinking, okay,you know, there is a natural market, people do want to try and that's the firststep. And once they get into the app, you want to know that people are actuallyusing, they're coming back. So that's all that retention play. So not onlythey're using, they're quite sticky, they're getting stickier and stickier,using more and more. And then you start, you would know at that point thosesignals that you have something that the market wants. And then from that pointyou start tuning what are the feature that you actually wanted to build more oryou want to pivot a little bit, start looking the segmentations of yourcustomers as well. Maybe there is a pocket of users that are super sticky. Andwhy is that? Who are they?

06:44
Candice Ren
And then that could help you slightly, you know, refocus your product if youneed be.

06:50
Anshika Arora
Yeah, I absolutely love that because you always hear about acquisition metrics,make sure you're tracking them. But actually retention metrics are just asimportant and often as startups, we don't have the largest of budgets. Arethere any kind of scrappy or unconventional ways that you've seen smallerbusinesses gather their data and actually leverage it in the best way?

07:11
Candice Ren
Yeah, so I wouldn't, it's probably not unconventional, but every company thatyou know operating digitally, you will have more data than you actually realisethat you hopefully, yeah. So that's one common thing we've seen for founders.So for an app to be functional or e commerce website, you know, you have, youare tracking those things because you then need to send an order out if it's amobile app or subscription app, you have to track those things so you know whatyou're serving to whom. So typically you have those data somewhere. Right. Andthat's typically a operational database. Right. So I know you run Eternity, aCRM tool. So, you know, for that tool to, you know, serve your audiences, youknow who they are, you know where they sign up, you know what they're doing andthose are all captured in your systems.

08:10
Candice Ren
So that could be Firebase, you know, if it's a mobile app, it could be GA4. Andthen, you know, product analytics leverage the out of the box tools. So thingslike Amplitude, Mixpanel. So you start, you know, looking at drop offs,funnels. A lot easier.

08:28
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

08:29
Candice Ren
And there's nothing wrong with doing things in Excel in the early stages. So ifyou are getting a few data signals from different places and centralisingsomewhere and building your financial models, there are, there's absolutelynothing wrong with that. And then I guess just asking people as well. There areplenty of places you can ask people like if they're signing up at the end ofthe flow. You can say, where did you hear about us?

08:55
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

08:55
Candice Ren
You know, if it's too difficult for you to actually connect all the dots, youknow, they come from marketing. They come from. So there's plenty of things youcould do.

09:05
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

09:06
Candice Ren
Without being too technically heavy.

09:08
Anshika Arora
Yeah. And I think that's really interesting that you said there around, forexample, collecting feedback. So qualitative date and qualitative data isanother thing that gets very commonly forgotten because you're often thinking,okay, let me provide my retention metrics, my churn metrics and all of thesedifferent things. But how important is qualitative data compared toquantitative data?

09:29
Candice Ren
Equally important. They go hand in hand and they often support each other.Right. So and especially at early days, like you said, there's not a lot oftechnology perhaps, or you know, data skills or even data. Because you're soearly, you only have a few, you know, maybe dozens of users, you know,depending on again what kind of product you're building. So you know, yourfocus group, your entire user base is your focus group. Pretty much, yeah.Which make it a lot easier in a way. So you can literally get, you know, infront of your customers and literally ask them, okay, why are you using myproduct? You know, what do you like about it? Would you know.

10:09
Anshika Arora
What do you not like? Exactly. Yeah.

10:12
Candice Ren
That's actually the more important question.

10:14
Anshika Arora
So, you know, it's a scary one. It's a scary one that no one wants to ask.

10:19
Candice Ren
But it's crucial. You really need to know if people are leaving. So if they'rechurning, why. And those are the things that number doesn't directly tell you.You can look for again, data indicators why someone is turning. But then thatinclude later. You have volumes of data. Then you know, data can tell you,okay, there's certain features to stop using or using less or they complained.You know, do you have your customer service, customer support systems, but inthe early stages it's hard stuff. You know, you might have just 20 users.

10:48
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

10:49
Candice Ren
And all of a sudden you have this really rich data that you can, you know,guide you to what you're developing.

10:55
Anshika Arora
And actually on that point, are there any examples that you can share with usof small data points which had led to really large insights in your experience?

11:03
Candice Ren
I'm quite used to larger dataset so I'm trying to think about like a smaller.It could be like it's just a funnel, like a sign up funnel. And sometimes it'snot quite obvious, especially if you are the founder slash developer that youbuild out the whole, you know, entire system yourself.

11:20
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

11:21
Candice Ren
And sometimes, you know, things are so obvious to you but not to the user.

11:24
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

11:25
Candice Ren
It might be missing some explanations or certain buttons, not very clear. Andthen you can see like a huge drop off at a step that you shouldn't. You don'tanticipate a drop off.

11:35
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

11:36
Candice Ren
But if you don't look at it from a step by step perspective, you just look atthe end result, you're thinking, okay, nobody wants my product. And sometimes.

11:44
Anshika Arora
But there's a story behind it.

11:46
Candice Ren
Absolutely. Yeah. And also only if you dig deep into the data or asking someonewhy you didn't convert. But you know, if you just based on the top levelnumbers and let's say your conversion rate is 10% but you didn't realise peoplecouldn't find the next button.

12:03
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

12:03
Candice Ren
I say this like you might sound like, you know,

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12:04

Anshika Arora

That's common sense.

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12:05

Candice Ren

It is, but it's not, it happens, you know, because you, it is just so obvious to you.

12:13
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

12:13
Candice Ren
People should see it but you know, they, you should be designed in a way thatis super obvious to people. Right. If it's not obvious, then you know, theydidn't find anything, go to the next step. It's not because they don't want touse it, they haven't had the chance. But if you don't look at it in the verydetailed manner, step by step manner, you don't know that's actually, you know,this page, people, everybody left here.

12:36
Anshika Arora
Yeah. And I think you're right. As founders we get so siloed into the productwhen actually you don't take a step back and think, hey, well what's my usergoing through and what's their journey?

12:45
Candice Ren
100% is spot on. What are they going through? Where are they getting stuck?

12:52
Amardeep Parmar
Hello. Hello. Quick interruption to let you know a bit more about BAE HQ. We'rethe community for high growth Asian heritage entrepreneurs, operators andinvestors in the UK. You can join us totally free@thebaehq.com/join. There.You'll get our CEO structure in your inbox every week, which is content, eventsand opportunities. You can also get access to our free startup fundamentalscourse by joining. Let's get back to the show.

13:24
Anshika Arora
What are some of the largest mistakes that you see startup founders making whenit comes to managing their data?

13:30
Candice Ren
I would say so the companies we typically work with are a bit, you know, afterproduct market.

13:35
Anshika Arora
Yes.

13:36
Candice Ren
Or you know, growing to certain stages, you know, or either they're pivoting orthey're exploding the scaling phase. Like 100% of the time they regretted notdoing it earlier.

13:49
Anshika Arora
Right.

13:49
Candice Ren
Well, not well most of the time. Right. I would say it's too extreme. So youknow, some of them do too early that also happens. I would say about 5%.

14:00
Anshika Arora
Right.

14:01
Candice Ren
That's typically second round founders, they want to do things properly early.

14:06
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

14:06
Candice Ren
But you know, there's also a scenario that your backend system hasn't finalisedyet. You know, lots of things are in flux. So if you build out a reallysolidate the pipeline too early, it might also be, you know, a waste ofresources. Right. But that's a lesser problem. The bigger problem is waitingtoo late or just deferring that problem. So we talked about simple ways to getthings started early. Always think about that. So don't put it in the backburner because I understand that. Because you know, you focus on growing yourapp, there's so many things you need to think about. But if you are nottracking anything, if you don't have any feedback on who is using what, how doyou know how to improve it?

14:49
Anshika Arora
Exactly. Know exactly that. So one of my final questions I have for you, whichis hopefully an interesting one, is if you were to start a data driven startuptoday from scratch, what would you do in your first 30 days to avoid makingthose kind of mistakes where you obviously don't want to over complicate it,but you still want to be gathering the right data.

15:10
Candice Ren
Yeah. I would probably say you don't need 30 days to have a plan because nofounder is going to sit here for 30 days. Just think about data. So maybesomething just really small and simple, like a templated way that everybody canuse. We talked about thinking about the user journey before. That is whatyou're trying to achieve. You think about where you are. I guess if we thinkabout like a hierarchical point of, you know, a structured way of thinkingabout data is sitting here today. Where am I at my product and services prerelease. Okay, so what do I want? I want people to come in, I want people tosign up for it. So how am I going to market? What's my marketing? You know,strategy. So how people coming in?

15:56
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

15:57
Candice Ren
And then from that point, I know the number one metric is sign ups.

16:01
Anshika Arora
Right.

16:01
Candice Ren
And that's one thing I need to focus on. And then maybe then the next stage,like your product started growing, you will naturally know when is the nextstep. Then you get to the next step and you think, okay, it's not no longersign ups. I have a lot. Yeah, that becomes a secondary metric. I'm still goingto track that, it's still important. But I'm going to move on a little bitfurther. Like you said, retention is really important. So I'm going to startthinking about that. So no matter what that is, you got to be very clear about.So knowing what is important could be one or two or a couple contributingfactors into the key metrics. And then the second thing is the definition. Itmight sound really bizarre like sign up, you sign up.

16:46
Candice Ren
But it actually gets a lot more intricate than that. So if you think about, Iwant to make sure I have a lot of active users and then it becomes. How do youdefine active? Yeah, or revenue is what you want to optimise towards. Is thatpost tax or post, you know, platform fees or post this or post that, whateverthat might be. And you know, based on your business model, there will be onethat makes sense for you, but you got to have it black and white somewhere.What do I mean by revenue or retention? Retention is a really good one. How amI measuring retention? Is that retention number making sense? Also people lookat like day one retention or day 30 retention.

17:28
Anshika Arora
Right.

17:30
Candice Ren
That's actually one of the, probably the biggest mistake in some investor askthat. You know, I, I personally wouldn't if I'm evaluating a company, becauseday 30 is a very specific day. Unless you have a product that's on a daily.People come back everyday.

17:49
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

17:50
Candice Ren
You know, tracking your diet, you know, you have to journal your three, youknow, meals every day. Unless youre diet, there's not a daily pattern. Right.What if you're like a weekly newsletter? Right. There's no way. People, what isday 30? Day 30 for me, maybe a Monday, day 33 for a Sunday.

18:08
Anshika Arora
Yeah.

18:08
Candice Ren
It means nothing. Literally means nothing. So what, retention actually mattersto you? Right. And you need to have that definition black and white. Because Iget this a lot from our VC partners as well. They get a investor deck and theyhave really amazing retention numbers. Whatever the number is, if you don'tknow what they are, it means nothing. My first question is, of course, what isthat retention metric? What is it measuring? What is the window? What is thecohort? So I would say the second step is defining what do you mean by and thenfinding out what the number is. So simple. Three steps. I know it's a bit of along story, but it's really those things that you think through at every stepof your development journey.

19:00
Anshika Arora
Yeah. And that really reduces data overwhelm. The way that you've broken itdown is because there are so many different definitions. But if you can defineyour own and kind of like you said, keep it black and white, it will reallymake that a lot easier and clearer.

19:13
Candice Ren
Because if you don't. And the thing is as you grow, it's no longer justyourself. Right. You are a founder, then you start having a team or maybe youhave a co founder and then everyone will be running through a different numberin their head. And maybe everyone is pulling the data slightly differently,manipulating the data differently. As you grow, you might have a founderassociate, or maybe whoever that might be in the team started doing this kindof maybe taking over from you. And then they started cognizing differently. Andall of a sudden different teams have different numbers. You can't have like acoherent conversation anymore. And that's very unfortunate. That's wastingpeople's time. And more importantly is the trust in data is lost that nobodywants to look at number anymore.

20:03
Candice Ren
Because we get into the meeting room, we start pickering, I got 50% revenue.And then marketing goes no product is not doing very well.

20:12
Anshika Arora
And bringing everyone's telling different stories, but they're not cohesiveanymore.

20:16
Candice Ren
Exactly. And definition is one of the key things that you can avoid thosequestions. And of course, even if you have a data dictionary, that's how wecall it, the definitions. Then there is also other things where you're gettingthe data. There's other nuances, but early stages you might be okay. As yougrow you can worry about those things. But the definition, get it black andwhite from day one.

20:41
Anshika Arora
Absolutely. Thank you so much Candice for coming on and talking to us all aboutdata. It was so helpful. As always with the BAE podcast, we ask our guest thethree questions and the first of which is who are three British Asians doingincredible pieces of work that you think the audience should check out?

20:57
Candice Ren
I love what you're doing at Eternity. Actually I looked it up. It's such aneeded market. I literally just had lunch with a friend of mine who wasplanning her wedding in three weeks time. I think it's the most stressfulmoment.

21:14
Anshika Arora
Especially if you see someone three weeks before.

21:16
Candice Ren
I know exactly. If you say oh my God, like I don't think you know. Yeah.There's so much going on in her head. It's like she has two jobs and you know,she went through the range of things that she's dealing with and it just mademe realise it's actually, yeah, a full time job. There's so many differentelements of it. Yeah. And I can totally see why having a CRM system that managethat is important. So people should check you out. And then I don't know if youknow this brand called Cheeky Panda. They are this sustainable bamboo made ofbamboo toilet paper. So led by Julie Chen. Sorry, is London. I think it'sLondon based. Yeah, London based brand. You can see you find them in Ocado. Soamazing brand growing fast. So that's the second one. Another colleague.

22:04
Candice Ren
Well, another colleague but I know his work Bhairav. I think he does CTO,fractional CTO. So he's got Atom Ventures so help a lot of founders with theirinitial build. It's very similar to what we do from a fractional data point ofview by fractional CTO. So those I think is very good support for founders. Sothose are probably the range of things that pop into my head. I mean there's somany others that will consider talk about the whole day.

22:38
Anshika Arora
Absolutely. And how can the audience find out a bit more about you?

22:42
Candice Ren
So LinkedIn, you know, very happy to chat with all founders from all walks oflife, all stages or you know, connect with me. I run a Data Agency called173Tech. We have a team of people smarter than me, all of them. So data peopleacross all sectors of the data pipeline. So if you have any questions, you canalso come to our website. We have a lot of materials there as well. Leave usquestions. We're very quick, we're very startup mode. We'll come back to youvery quickly. So either LinkedIn or our website.

23:15
Anshika Arora
Amazing. And is there anything that our audience can do to help you?

23:18
Candice Ren
Oh, that's very kind to ask. I will say I always love learning the differentchallenges founders have and the cool things that people are doing with theirdata. Like you said, what are some of the hacks people are doing? So if youhave some amazing hacks, send them our way, send them my way. And alsoobviously, if you know any founders that are facing data challenges that needsome help, spread the word for us. Yeah, it would be greatly appreciated.

23:47
Anshika Arora
Absolutely. Any final words from you?

23:49
Candice Ren
We talked about this. You know, the data, overwhelming, I will say as afounder, you know, the gut feeling is what made you a founder, Right. You know,you have this inkling or from your experience, this is something that's goingto succeed, right. Could be the wildest ideas, but you have that gut feelingand then as you grow, data come into play or at some point you started lookingat data. Don't let data replace that gut feeling, let that validate it. Soalways follow your gut feeling. That's what I'm trying to say. And, but youknow, quickly validate with your data. So don't, you know, in the off chanceyou have a bad gut feeling and don't spend six months on it, you know, havesome data signal.

24:35
Amardeep Parmar
Thank you for watching. Don't forget to subscribe. See you next time.

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