A tale of frustration to innovation of the Metrics layer

At MemePunks, an NFT memes startup, Benji was at the helm of the data team. He ended up ultra frustrated and start his own company, BBMetrics.

Here is what happened...

MemePunks (MP) had a strong data-driven culture driving the stupendous growth for their first year of selling meme NFTs. All the 33 team members were aligned on one goal of driving 30% revenue growth quarter over quarter. Benji and the team were helping all the business teams to uncover useful insights. But in the end, most of the key members of the data team left MP sad and disappointed.

Benji was surprised by the impact of Metrics inconsistencies and felt defeated after all this hard work.

Even though Benji had done a great job of creating a truly data-driven culture at MemePunks, scaling it was hard. Definition of "Revenue" was the main culprit. Revenue as CEO and investors saw it (Gross) was different than Finance (Net); Growth team had its own version of Revenue (Total) as well. In the review meeting before the exodus of the data team, everyone was excited to review the progress of the business and what MP should focus on next. Of course, the intention was to use data to drive all the decisions. It was time for the data team's work to shine. During the review, the execs were divided on the outcome of the previous quarter. The CFO thought that they ended up missing the growth target by a huge margin whereas CEO and CMO believed that Revenue was 10 pp better than their goal of 30%. Misalignment caused execs to not trust the data story and ended up adjourning the meeting, leaving the data team in dismay.

Around this time, Airbnb's Minerva, Drew from DBT, and Benn from Mode started the discussion of the "Metrics layer" to unify the definitions of metrics. This was very exciting for Benji and the analytics community. He got excited and jumped headfirst into building the metrics layer under the banner of BBMetrics. Investors of MemePunks understood the problem well and invested heavily in Benji's startup as this could solve the Trillion dollar data problem.

Its been 2 years since BBMetrics was founded and they have revolutionized the analytics space

Today, BBMetrics has been creating a great tool that data practitioners are using to impact strategic decisions at various companies. The bickering about "whose data is correct?" is a thing of the past and the new problem is how to pull these metrics into all ERP tools running the business.

Finally, through this fictional story, I wanted to highlight the missing glue of the fragmented data stack. I have seen this play out over and over again in many product and business experiments being run. If this resonated with you join the conversation here. I am personally very excited to see where the new developments in this area take the data industry.

TL;DR

MemePunks to BBMetrics :

• MemePunk was a data-driven rocketship startup with an all-star data team.

• Misalignment on the definition of Revenue burnt the data team at MemePunks.

• Benji started BBMetrics to solve the problem of disparate metrics definitions.

• Metrics layer was built as a single source of truth for analytics, reporting, and experimentation.

If this resonated with you join the conversation here and follow me at @nehiljain for more.