Yanzu Data

After launching last month, I unfortunately got pulled onto some other projects for quite a while. Fortunately, that has slowed down a bit and I am now able to spend some time with Yanzu Data.

The first task is to get some meaningful traffic to the website. I intend for the website to be the primary lead generation channel, so it's important for me to determine the best ways of getting relevant people to visit the site.

It's not a popular way to do so, but paid ads have served me well in prior businesses, so I decided to start there. One thing I like about paid ads is that you can decide an amount to risk on an experiment and then go get a given amount of traffic quickly. For example, you might say I want to spend $100 to get N visits over the next week (or day). The ability to get a lot of visitors quickly is a huge accelerant. Plus, by setting the ad to automatically shut off when your budget is hit, you can contain your spend as desired.

What did I expect from running the ads? Primarily, I wanted to learn whether the initial launch page resonated. I would know this on the basis of any engagement I saw during the period of the ads: do people create accounts, or do they email with questions?

One mistake I made was I didn't create other ways for users to signal interest. For example, there was no mailing list signup or chat on the site. After a couple of days with the ad running, I could see that the ad creative was driving traffic, but the people who came to the site were not engaging. Learning this was a big win!

After learning that, I scrambled to do a few things. First, I added an email collection widget and chat to the site.

Second, I engaged my buddy at Reuben at Mimiran to get feedback on the copy. The outcome of that call was significant. Reuben pushed me to be more clear about my audience. Who is Yanzu Data for? That call led me to tighten up my positioning, which is resulting in me overhauling the Web copy. (This update is tedious, but it is exactly the point of running experiments like this.)

Reuben also suggested that by only having a single CTA option to register an account, I might be missing people earlier in their buying journey. I am currently adding "Book a Call" and "Book a Demo" Calendly links to the site.

The experiment has another day or so to run, but already I can declare it a success. I learned something, improved my positioning, and am making the site more useful. All in all, a win.

How do you run experiments on your site? I'd love to hear!

Today, I am publicly launching Yanzu Data.

I started Yanzu Data to help companies solve the type of data and analytics problems I have solved many times as a consultant. From building data warehouses to ETL pipelines to reports and dashboards, there are a common set of activities that many organizations eventually need to incorporate into their data operations.

But unlike in software engineering where there is a fairly standard set of open-source tools, data teams often use an assortment of proprietary software that doesn't play well together. Even startups and those that use open source end up facing issues when integrating third-party data, which can be provided via API, S3, FTP(!), or other non-SQL method. Incorporating this data often requires developers to get involved, increasing costs and timeline.

With Yanzu Data, I want to make accessible to organizations of all sizes the best open source software solutions for data management and analytics. Today's launch is about managed Apache Superset, which provides a similar featureset to Tableau, but at a much lower price. (And it's open source, so there is no vendor lock-in.)

I'm looking forward to the journey. Please reach out if you have comments or know anybody that could use Yanzu Data.