If data is the new dollar, where is your savings account?

In 2016 Manish Gupta, who mentor entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley wrote an article titled “data is the new dollar”. In it, he talks about the value of data both in terms of growth and additional value adding.  

“The ability to collect and analyze rich, dynamic data—made possible through cloud computing, massive data warehousing systems and business intelligence solutions—could turn companies many would never consider as being in “the data business” into potentially lucrative purveyors of information.” 

He continues by encouraging companies to utilize Data Platform-as-a-Service to facilitate data utilization.  

“In short, with dPaaS, companies can get down to the business of extracting value from their data, rather than spending so much time wrestling with it.” 

His advice is sound. Even if you do not intend to monetize your data, making sure that you collect it and has easy access to analyzing both current data, but also long-term data trends are an essential part of smart growth.  

“Most startups just don’t have the time or resources to make the most of their data treasure trove. Collating it is time-consuming and generally there are so many other things that takes focus in those early days of building the product and user base while testing market fit. But collecting data and build a data-set early on is a worthwhile exercise and it doesn’t have to be time consuming. “

Startups everywhere are sitting on a data mountain and it’s only getting bigger. In fact, this heap of unstructured data is increasing by some 62% every year. Unfortunately, the vast majority of it is unanalyzed, unused, and left to simply float around in bottomless ‘data lakes’.  

Most business leaders innately ‘get’ the potential for innovation, advancement, and growth that data represents. But opportunity or not, startups and corporates alike face a huge challenge: how can they begin to understand and use the data they have access to? 

Today more than half of companies (53%) have adopted big data analytics according to Forbes. But a large minority of startups, SMEs, and others just don’t have access to enough in-house resources to benefit from their data and get the edge on their competition. 

So, what can startups do to unlock their big data potential? 

Let data build, while you focus on growth 

Of course, nearly every startup’s focus is on innovation, market penetration, and growth. And as a startup founder you know you need to build your success on data, but in those early days of bootstrapping it can be hard to find the time to also collect and dig into data.  

Unfortunately, that means that when you do find the time to utilize and analyze your data, you are starting from scratch, setting the process back months or in some cases years.  

That’s why it’s important to think data collection and labeling into the earliest stages of your startup. Spend a bit of time to consider “what data might be worthwhile to use in 1 month? In one year? In ten years?” Then set up processes for collecting that data. Don’t stress about analyzing it or even looking at it right now if you don’t have the time, just make sure it slowly but surely builds up.  

How Besedo’s Implio can help you 

If data is the new dollar, then our all-in-one content and comment moderation tool is your savings account. It allows you to build a high-quality decision database and learn about your customers at the same time.

Creating a workable dataset entails a lot of work; you’ll need 100,000 or more labelled items (items where you have taken a yes or no decision) in order to get the insights you need to build accurate ML models. By working with Implio from the outset, you won’t have to spend precious time and resource building these datasets from scratch, because the platform will already have done the hard work for you.   

All you need to do is start using the platform to moderate your content and Implio will store the dataset you build and label over time. And when you are ready to use our AI to analyze and moderate your content, thanks to the raw data you’ve collected, you will have everything ready so we can build accurate machine learning algorithms – the exact insight you need to grow your company and become profitable.  

Don’t wait. Start building your data-set today! 

AI moderation might not be top of your list right now, but why not use Implio as you build up your business to also slowly compile your data set? When you’re ready, you’ll have all the insights you need, right at your fingertips. And as an added bonus, using Implio is free for up to 10k items per month!  

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