Post-mortem of our first YC startup: a Reverse ETL

Dupe. Discussed last month: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34051088

> Growth marketers wanted more autonomy to manage their data, but were not necessarily willing to put the extra effort into: (i) understanding the structure of a database (dozens of tables), (ii) practice lightweight data modeling.

> To summarize, we listened (too) “literally” to interviewees and assumed that “SQL literacy” prevented growth teams from accessing the data they needed. The truth is what prevents them is a mix between “data literacy” (data concepts, and how the data is collected and stored within each company) and “appetite to ramp up on data”.

As someone in the industry, this doesn't goes deep enough. In my experience, many teams, Growth Teams in particular, blamed their problems on the data, when it's really that they don't have a model. By model, I mean a simple representation of the problem space they're trying to solve. Models are useful because they abstract a bunch of details, that are unnecessary for success. The right model enables shared focus because all the disagreements are settled outside the model. But building a model takes a lot of thought, which can't really be automated. Nevermind the consensus to get people to buy into it. I'd even argue that the analytics managers who are hired themselves are mostly useful for translating existing models, defined by leadership, into data, and not coming up with one themselves.

Growth teams struggle quite a bit with modeling; I suspect because the problem space they have control over is largely saturated. A model fitted to that space tell them that, so instead they play the data blame-game. The OP subtly hints at the deception in their userbase.

Are there any more long reads like this? I find them way more beneficial than the success stories

I swear I read the exact same post here a couple months back and it was also being commented they’re using the post mortem in a smart way for marketing their new thing.