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Today on The Startup Chat, Steli and Hiten talk about business Intelligence for startups. Handling all the data that you interact with at your startup can be a challenge, and it gets even more complicated as your business grows. It’s important to be on top of your data as things can easily get out of hand for your startup if you don’t. In today’s episode of the show, Steli and Hiten talk about what business intelligence means, questions to answer when you do business intelligence, tools that can help you do business intelligence better and much more. Time Stamped Show Notes: 00:00 About today’s topic 00:20 Why this topic was chosen. 03:06 What business intelligence means. 03:48 How you’re always doing business intelligence. 05:12 Questions to answer when you do data intelligence. 06:32 How some companies handle business intelligence 06:43 Why doing data intelligence can be tricky. 08:01 The right way to handle business intelligence. 08:33 Concerns to have when doing business intelligence. 09:14 Tools that can help you do business intelligence better. 3 Key Points: The amount of data in your business skyrockets as your customer base grows.You’re always doing business intelligence as long as you’re looking at some metrics.Trying to put data together is tricky. [0:00:01] Steli Efti: Hey everybody, this is Steli Efti. [0:00:03] Hiten Shah: And this is Hiten Shah. [0:00:04] Steli Efti: And today on The Startup Chat, we're going to talk about business intelligence for startups. So here's the deal, Hiten. Here's a trend that I've seen over the last few years and also something that's been on my mind. It's the big topic of data and insights within your company. I think when you're just starting out in your startup and you're a handful of people and you're working day and night and you're super involved with everything, you generally have, and should have, everybody care about data and look at the numbers. Look at the information and collect and do the research, and constantly and consistently generate insights that help you adjust and pivot until you figure out the big building blocks of your business. Try to figure out what is it that we're building? Who is it that we're building it for? What differentiates us? How do we bring this to market? All these things. But as your company grows and as you become 20 people and then 50 and then a 100, and as your customers are now thousands and thousands of customers, and you grow to hundreds of thousands and millions in revenue, the amount of data in all regards of your business, this can be marketing data, this could be sales data, this could be success data, this could be product metrics and data. The amount of information in your business skyrockets. And there comes a point where any time there's a question around specific metrics, you can have a team go after it and try to figure it out. But it seems like there are more and more companies that will have somebody or a team that's actually, to a large degree, responsible for doing business intelligence, which means having an overview and an insight into most of the big business metrics, and trying to generate insights or view opportunities or risks ahead of everybody else. Because they have a holistic view and the mandate to be looking and driving data to generate insights for the business. And this is still a new field. There's a lot of bullshit involved. There's a lot of lack of clarity on, is this needed? When is this needed? Who should be doing this? How should it be done? So I wanted to chat with you a little bit about this, because I know you are incredibly experienced and insightful when it comes to data in companies. So first of all, when you think about business intelligence for startups, is that just bullshit? Is that an amazing field that needs a lot more investment?