Nano-Analytics: The minimum threshold

I challenge you to refute the following: there may be no truly useful involvement of WA for micro-businesses with no pre-existing data or even market, and that to claim so would be relying on very noisy data (i.e. that of a few testers).

How do you permeate “data-driven insight culture” into the nano-scale?

-Maciek Adwent in the comments section of the last post

Analytics is defined as the application of statistical methods to data to derive business insights.

Without data, there is no analytics.

QED

I’ll argue that the definition of a business is the taking inputs, adding value to them, and the production of outputs with the intent to sell them. A profitable business takes inputs, adds value to them, and sell the outputs for a profit.

Where there are inputs, and where there are customers, there is data. At bear minimum, in Canada, a business must maintain a spreadsheet that lists inputs (usually in the form of expenses) and outputs (usually in the form of accounts receivable invoices). That raw data can be analyzed. Even if a business has only free inputs (the internet) and only one customer, there is still a single invoice. That’s not much to go on. But it still makes analytics possible.

If we follow the Novo line, a line that I repeat frequently when talking about restaurant and hair salon analytics, small businesses can certainly benefit from analytics. The problem there isn’t even threshold, it’s demand generation (marketing the marketing analytics).

At the nano-level, the threshold for analytics is data. So, there is a minimum threshold.