

Find the key to your app’s growth without an army of data scientists - sskates
http://blog.amplitude.com/2014/07/29/find-the-key-to-your-apps-growth-without-an-army-of-data-scientists/

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kiyoto
This rings so true. Last April, I had a chance to chat with an engineer at an
(explosively growing) early stage B2C startup. He gave a talk about "data
science", so I walked up to him afterwards and asked him if he considered
himself to be a data scientist and did anything that's remotely like
statistical inference.

He said, "nah, most of what I do is collecting a lot of data and just
segmenting them in a bunch of ways. Pivot tables go really far as far as
product insights are concerned."

Then, he added, "that whole data science thing in my talk...that was to grab
attention."

I am NOT saying statistics and machine learning is useless. They are
tremendously useful. But chances are good that it pays a lot more early on to
collect a lot of data and ask basic questions from different perspectives.

~~~
alishiu
Yep, there are plenty of useful (and actionable) insights to be gained just by
the data you can get in a standard analytics dashboard. If you know how many
people did what, and who came back, you can already learn so much about how
people are using your app and what you should focus on.

