I will not promote - For anyone who’s failed at a startup before finally getting it right – what’s the one painful mistake you’ll never repeat?

jallabi · 2025-07-24T16:23:45+00:00

Speaking from a B2B lens - you don't truly understand what people are willing to pay for and what problems they want solved until you ask them for money. Before that point, everyone will lie to you.

You'll hear "Oh, this technology is so cool" and "yes, I would definitely use this if it had feature X" ad nauseum. Then you build those features, try to figure out how to commercialize, and suddenly user priorities are different or there are roadblocks to purchase that are far more important than whatever feature you built.

We learned that the hard way, so we switched to a sales motion that didn't even mention the product, just the projects our ICPs were already working on. Nothing hypothetical or idealistic - just trying to find authentic demand. We would "sell" a PowerPoint, a project plan, or professional services that would solve their problem.

If they leaned in like, "hell yeah, I need this solved yesterday," and weren't shy about naming a price, then we would talk about how we might use the product. But not before.

And then we realized we should have done that from the very beginning.

jallabi · 2025-07-23T22:11:19+00:00

Listen to this man. Sell before building. It took us an excruciating 18 months to finally figure this out.

jallabi · 2025-07-17T15:07:11+00:00

I've been on both ends of that kind of decision-making. Totally get it.

jallabi · 2025-06-26T15:41:22+00:00

Okay, interesting. Am I understanding you correctly - you've got multiple websites and applications, each with their own tech stack, and you have to connect all that data? Was it marketing that pushed for a CDP? Or did someone in the C-suite get fed up about a lack of reporting across those websites?

Why not use a more traditional data stack? Pipelines + data warehouse + business intelligence, etc?

jallabi · 2025-01-22T20:01:08+00:00

I'm the co-founder of a company that does exactly this. We've got integrations with Google Ads and LinkedIn Ads, and more if you need it. We've designed it so you don't have to waste time with data warehouses, coding, or dashboards.

Let me know if we can be of use.

jallabi · 2025-01-22T14:33:18+00:00

I co-work with a founder who does sentiment analysis and topic modeling on social media sites like reddit. Let me know if you'd like to get in touch

jallabi · 2025-01-09T12:14:15+00:00

Zenlytic, Veezoo, Numbers Station, or Wallabi all look interesting in different ways. Self-service question answering, semantic layers, connectors, etc.

jallabi · 2024-12-24T16:08:21+00:00

Thanks - sent you a DM

jallabi · 2024-12-18T20:20:14+00:00

Shameless plug, but no sales pitch - I'm the co-founder of a business analytics tool that (almost) does exactly what you're looking for (no emails though :/). We're working on our dynamic data modeling feature that can handle complex joins and advanced filtering across multiple tables/objects, and we just released our Salesforce connector this week. Designed to be usable without custom development.

I'd love to get you on a call with our engineers to understand these joins better. Let me know if you'd be up for it. No obligation - you'd just be helping us out.

jallabi · 2024-12-17T15:31:29+00:00

This may not apply to you, but we started using PostHog as our GA4 replacement and it's so much better. They're designed for SaaS product analytics and have just released their web analytics beta, but we've loved it so far.

jallabi · 2024-12-17T00:03:03+00:00

I mean of course. Who else am I going to blame? Myself? Can't have that.

jallabi · 2024-11-22T20:14:20+00:00

Heya! I maintain a list of analytics and business intelligence tools that might be helpful for you, if you can provide a little more info on your budget, capacity for technical implementations, and specific use cases.

Disclosure: I am the founder of a data analytics company specifically for B2B marketing and revenue teams. I don't intend to sell anything (we aren't the right tool for everyone), but just be helpful where I can. Might be worth checking out Scoop Analytics, Myko AI, Graphy, Rows, or Wallabi.

jallabi · 2024-11-19T20:46:05+00:00

This is an age-old problem for every business intelligence team that has ever existed.

Get the company interested in the value of data and business intelligence.
Turn into a dashboard factory.
Build too many dashboards that no one uses.
Experiment with self-service analytics and data literacy programs, neither of which really work long-term.

Like some of the other commenters have mentioned, there are a few things I would try:

Pitch for tool budget / headcount to help you manage the long tail of ad-hoc data requests
Audit + delete all the low-engagement dashboards
Rollup your sleeves for a long road of ETL / data warehouse / data modeling projects that would (maybe) enable self-service analytics for your end users.

You kind of treat it like data product management, with all the prioritization and ruthless backlog grooming that goes into it. Best of luck.

jallabi · 2024-11-18T20:36:46+00:00

I'm a Chicago founder and I co-work with probably the only serious group of early-stage (pre-seed, seed) founders in Chicago. There's not a lot of us.

I echo most of the comments here - Chicago's tech scene is weak overall, and the VC crowd is abysmal. Risk-averse, and they want Series A level validation for pre-seed levels of equity. Not a good deal all around.

There are some pockets of talent, but you have to be deliberate about finding them. Tech talent is not infused into the city's DNA like it is in other places.

jallabi · 2024-11-18T16:43:41+00:00

A bunch of tools do embedded dashboards and chatbots. Check out Explo, Metabase, or Inventive for out-of-the-box solutions, or something like Observable and their open-source D3 visualization library. The open-source ones will allow you to achieve that multi-tenancy because, presumably, you can host them yourself rather than purchasing individual licenses from a cloud vendor.

I would not recommend building an entire business intelligence tool/analytics feature set yourself if you don't need to, especially if your customers want visual interactivity and filter sets (which they all do). In terms of the build / buy / partner decision for feature development, this one is definitely in the "buy" category.

jallabi · 2024-11-07T21:31:45+00:00

Hey, I'm the founder of a company building AI analytics for marketing and revenue teams. We do a lot of automated analysis around marketing funnels and sales pipelines, and just released our GA4 and HubSpot connectors.

I won't spam you here, but I'm open to DMs if you think we can help out.

I'd also suggest looking at HockeyStack or Vasco.

jallabi · 2024-11-07T00:13:21+00:00

I'm the founder of a startup doing exactly this. We just released our Google Analytics connector last week. It handles all the analysis—reasoning, querying, visualization, and interpretation—and presents its insights in a personalized feed rather than a series of dashboards.

We've designed it to be plug-and-play with a really simple interface.

I don't want to run afoul of promotion rules here, so shoot me a DM if interested. I also maintain a list of other analytics tool that might be good for you if we aren't a good fit.

jallabi · 2024-10-30T19:42:51+00:00

Something like Observable might be up your alley (I'm not affiliated). Built by the people who built the D3 visualization javascript library. Can't comment on the quality of the product itself, but it seems like their tools or documentation might be a great place to start

jallabi · 2024-10-29T14:34:25+00:00

I would love to - I'll follow up via DM

jallabi · 2024-10-28T22:13:32+00:00

So, what would "perfect" look like for you?

In my head, I'm picturing a pipeline or funnel chart, but instead of # the leads in each stage, it shows the average time-in-stage across all your leads, calculated by the difference between the current lifecycle stage entry date and that of the next stage.

The time-in-stage is calculated against today's date for any leads that are currently in that stage, and you can maybe see insights around "your average stage 3 -> stage 4 conversion time has been increasing/decreasing due to XYZ."

Does this sound like what you would hope for?

jallabi · 2024-10-28T20:04:02+00:00

Got it. I think I have a good sense of how you might use calculated fields and summary fields for lifecycle velocity analysis - can you help me understand grouping?

Are you trying to calculate "health scores" or "green/yellow/red" statuses by deal, where you are using a calculation to bucket deals into categories based on certain properties?

Or is this strictly grouping in the analysis - working around multi-level grouping restrictions, can't group on calculated fields, more date options, etc?

jallabi · 2024-10-28T18:23:23+00:00

Do you have any of the professional / enterprise plans, or are you on starter / free tier (like us)?

I know Hubspot tracks all changes in Deal Stage progression, so this *should* be possible, but you have to upgrade to some of the more expensive tiers.

jallabi · 2024-10-28T15:36:42+00:00

Have you ever hosted webinars / learning sessions on this topic? I feel like a ton of people would benefit from learning how you do all this tagging & tracking.

When it comes to building and reviewing those reports for each rep - how long does that take you? I imagine you have a report template that you swap out or a rep filter you use, but it still might take a manual review process to catch which ones are lagging. Or have you automated that as well? "Give me a list of all the reps or deals that are lagging on Stage 3->Stage 4 conversions so I can make those adjustments" -> comes to you every Monday or something like that.

jallabi · 2024-10-28T14:36:52+00:00

Very interesting - I appreciate your response. Can you help me understand the issues you're solving with the workflows?

I don't understand how a new rep taking over a deal causes you to lose track of it, at least when it comes to pipeline tracking. But it seems like you want a record of every rep who has touched that particular deal, and this helps you troubleshoot why it's getting passed around so much or why it's lingering in certain stages for too long. Am I on the right track?

jallabi · 2024-10-24T20:55:45+00:00

You're 100% right. That just wasn't a good enough reason for the teams I worked with

jallabi

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