Why Collecting Data Early Benefits Your Startup

The following is a guest post by Alexander Brooks.

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Startups come with a number of challenges and rewards for the entrepreneur. There's always something that requires our attention and effort. However certain tasks should be a priority over other projects in the infancy stage of launching a company. We're going to discuss the importance of collecting data from the start and how it can impact your business.

Clarity of Market Needs

As entrepreneurs, we often assume what we think the customers really want without discovering customer actual needs. By collecting data on your customer interactions, you can get direct answers to how customers will receive, use and share your services. This is key to developing a product/service that can gain traction and grow your business. Your product should be driven by market needs and not business assumptions.

Build a Better Product

Gathering customer data early in the start-up phase of your business will support effective product development. A number of customer acquisitions, feedback, and retention will provide insight to what features to improve. Your product/service will succeed or fail based on how you make adjustments from customer feedback. By collecting customer data early, you're structuring your company to make data driven decisions and not guess work.

More Customer Insight

Collecting data in the early phase of your startup will give insight to your customer shopping patterns. Having access to this data creates the opportunity to deliver unique and specific experiences. Creating unique customer experiences can be great for gaining a competitive advantage in the market. This can lead to increase customer loyalty and average revenue generated per customer.

If you're not using data analytics to support your startup's growth, now's the perfect time to start. Start identifying what questions you need to answer to make the best product. Create user groups to foster continuous product improvement by facilitating user testing. Ultimately you're going to discover what can be improved about your product/service by effectively collecting data.

Alex Brooks is the founder and CEO of AE Brooks, LLC (d/b/a Entreprov), a Seattle-based firm that helps small and medium-sized businesses increase their customer base and extend lifetime value of current customers through machine learning and business strategy. Mr. Brooks may be contacted at alexb@entreprov.com.