One thing you can do this week to move faster in 2023

Does it count as spring cleaning if it happens in December?

Do you have a big presentation coming up? Use Rhetoric. We make it mind-blowingly easy to practice and get feedback from your team.

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There are several experiences that just about every early(ish) startup shares. This is one of the great joys of our line of work: regardless of how lonely building something new might be, just about every roadblock we encounter has hundreds of other people just like us standing around it and scratching their heads. Even better, there’s another hundred people who have gotten past it who can throw us a ladder. It’s truly very cool.

Here’s an example:

You get curious about a marketing channel, new user, or latest retention. You piece together some data to get to an answer. Awesome. However, this answer, as always, begs another question for us to answer. (if you give a mouse a cookie…)

We’re slow to answer these questions because we have not invested in the right data infrastructure. Our metrics are not well defined and our data sources are scatted.

These questions only become more common — prepare for them. Getting these data sources cleaned up, metrics defined, and dashboards built can be a quarter-long endeavor, especially if we don’t have a data team in place yet. We often find ourselves scrambling to piece together systems (or rebuilding existing ones) for getting, storing, visualizing, and analyzing data. It’s impossible to effectively launch sophisticated campaigns or deeply understand our users without a well-built data stack.

I promise that there is no better feeling than the one when your whole team has the data story right in front of you. If you don’t know where to start, give us a shout. We’ll throw you a ladder.

Happy weekend,

Raman at Rhetoric

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📚 What’s made me a better storyteller this week

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There’s something about the New York Times’ Year in Pictures each year that makes me feel like I just read a complete historic record of the last twelve months. It’s an exercise in pulling story from art and if you haven’t checked it out yet this year, I highly recommend it.

This whole series is going to be awesome. Scroll Stoppers’ take on curating expectations (and how that applies to storytelling via newsletter) is excellent: “We need somebody else to tell us what is interesting. Newsletters are the new water cooler talks.”

In many ways, there is no greater story than a game of sports. For a thing that seems so infinite, here’s why 2022 feels like an ending in so many ways.