u/datawazo

linkedIn reminded me yesterday that it's been 9 years since I added owner of an analytics company as a job.

I know a lot of people here are interested in this path, so every so often I try to open myself up to an AMA if anyone wants to know what it's like, how I started, how it's going.

FAQ:

How did you get first client - First client was from Reddit, second from Freelancer, third - ~12th were from Upwork. I was moonlighting early and didn't want to advertise myself too much locally and get in trouble with my FTJ, so relied on online options. Upwork 9 years ago was tough, but way more forgiving than it is now.

How do you get clients now - Prior to this year, leant a lot on content. Building public use dashboards and posting them to LinkedIn, twitter when it didn't suck and relevant subreddits. I also do a lot of open enrollment (paid) training that leads to clients. Referrals and a few in person events rounded out the rest. Online content I find has tanked with the rise of AI, so trying to figure out what my next steps are.

Tips for starting - Have a public portfolio. A good one. One that showcases first your understanding of how to use Tableau and 2 your ability to understand data and data storytelling. Try to make it practical, using open data if possible. My 2nd client onboarded with me because they were a sports facility management company and I had done a viz with my city's facility usage open data. Perfect happenstance, but that will go further than another netflix viz.

Know Tableau but also know SQL to efficiently bring data into Tableau, that's what I wish I knew more of when I started and had to quickly get good at.

What does a day look like - Most of my work these days is backend, facilitating tableau dev for other people (clients or my team). So I spend a lot of time in databases. I spend a lot of time in meetings. I love live building on a call, it's so powerful and useful. I do still work in Tableau but it's a lot less than 3-4 years ago. Also PowerBI has probably surpassed Tableau in terms of client work for me (partly because one of my team members has our 2 - 3 main Tableau contracts).

How do you charge - I charge purely hourly. A lot of "gurus" recommend fixed rate because there is more margin and that's true, but I hate scope management so much that I just do hourly bill. It's seldom been an issue with any clients. I started charging $75/hour which is what my first client recommended, and have just gradually increased it from there.

Best project - One of my favorite projects was a non client project tracking flight delays across Canada that got me onto National news. I had been on local news a few times but this was the highest my content has soared, and it was really cool. Also did a random radio interview for a province 3,000 KM away.

Worst Project - My least favorite projects always comes down to the people. It's can be so hard to balance self respect with needing money - easier as time has gone on. Had a guy that would email his requirements, I'd build them out and publish, he'd not check for 10 days and then get back to me with URGENT. He actually emailed me for a project update Christmas Morning (he was American, yes he knew it was Christmas. Schedule send that shit if you have to) and that was the final straw.

Lucky to be in a role where I get to try different things against different sectors. We've been trying to find more opportunities for AI - and obviously learning like everyone else along the way.

Here are three projects from ~the last week, how they went, what I would have changed.

1 - the great

We got a PDF from a client that had a bunch of data in it as a table. They tried a PDF to excel tool. But the merged cells were a nightmare. It was structured as "Finished Product" "Ingredient" but the FG was only in the first row and not tied to any ingredients. Worse was that the first Ingredient was also in the same row, alongside the FG.

I tried Excel and PowerQuery to get a split working but nothing was consistently working.

Loaded it into Claude and it used a Python PDF parsing framework to extract it all perfectly. Subsequently, we had other PDFs containing images of text with info about these finished goods (think menus) that Claude was also able to easily parse through and extract.

This was a huge win, highly recommend. With the caveat - I made sure nothing we loaded in was proprietary. Even though we're on "Pro"

2 - the good

Separate project for a retailer that, somehow, has no product categorization. We've been with them for two years and it's been a consistent sore spot. No one has had the appetite to sit through their 100K skus | sku descriptions and categorize them. We tried this with Chatgpt last summer and it was underwhelming. Tried in in Claude last week. It was WAY better, but with familiar caveats.

We loaded the descriptions and asked it to categorize across 6 categories, 19 sub categories. I also asked it to provide a confidence score for each. It nailed about 95%. Massive win. But the confidence score was useless. So chasing down the extra 5% is still messy. The errors ARE more consistent than when we did Chat though. More localized. Like a frozen good manufacturer it is >30% wrong on - categorizing "Frozen Cheese Bites" as Dairy, for example. The problem is someone still has to find and hand code those last 5%. So how much time are we really saving? Hopefully enough, now that the errors are more grouped.

Full disclosure - this was a 2000 sku pilot, I'm running the full thing this week.

3 - The Ugly.

Looking at ROI of a customer re-engagement campaign. If someone doesn't buy for 2 years they fall into "un engaged" and go to the re-engagement funnel. Client wanted to know the what the optimal amount of time in re-engagement was before just giving up on someone.

So they had purchases in file A, re-engagement touchpoints in file B. In my head I knew how I would solve this in SQL | Tableau. Not really that easy but you find their disengagement date, count the # of mailings until they rebuy ... doable. Needs some work but doable.

Again I stripped both files down to remove any posssible noise. It was just Cust ID, Buy Date, Buy Amount and in the other Cust ID, Campaign Date.

Loaded them into Claude, gave it the details and it create a dashboard. Bing bang bomb. Copied the text and screenshot and sent to client they LOVED it.

But wanted more. They wanted break even point, so they gave me avg $ value per touchpoint. I gave it to Claude.

He came back with a dollar value of re-engagement purchases that was 60% of the whole file. Insanely not likely. Passed it my concerns, it agreed with me, gave me a new number. I gave that to client they said still seems way too high. Validated it against a subset of the data and it was close to two x.

This is, IMO, where these things fall apart quickest. Once things go south, you're almost better offer completely pulling the plug and either restarting or not. I find there's no ability to right the ship. The logic its running is opaque, it's got no backbone to push back on anything I say. We're just in this spiral now where it gives me numbers and all I can do is hope they are correct.

I'm going to go back to my SQL + Tableau solution. At least that way I know the rough guardrails it should be operating in.

Anyway. Those are my three forays into the "new world" this week. Happy to discuss anything on this.

I ran 15KM yesterday, 10KM hard Wednesday, 12 on Monday. I'm sore. My body hurts. It's my rest day. I'm getting some work done at a coffee shop.

Just saw a guy with a good pace going, top off, and now I'm like - do I need a rest day? Do I need to work? I could do a riverside run.

Hills scare the crap out of me, primarily because they've consistently killed every good run.

I struggle bussed a 15k today because it was moderately hilly, running it much slower than previous flat half marathon goes.

Is that just the way she be? Or can I actively be better.

My client acq is struggling this year and I think it's because the online channels have just gotten so bleak. For context it's​ our 8th year in business.

Heres how I've previously gotten clients:

1. Maintaining a good presence on twitter + posting content. My audience is pretty left leaning though an X has been a wasteland for a few years.

2. Reddit by engaging in a couple relevant tech communities. This was always unpredictable but it did drive some leads. Now it seems like overall engagement on here has cratered. Primarily because of all the Automated posts (imo)

3. Linkedin was a big channel for us posting quality content that includes analysis, how tos and day in the life stuff. Now ... it's more hit and miss. Content posts do really well, arguably better. But most other posts do poorly.

We'd also comment a lot on linkedin to build a presence, but have been finding less and less that's worthwhile to comment on.

We never were successful on Meta.

Imo online has just become a wasteland of shit and a lot of people have disengaged. But maybe I'm too jaded. Maybe it's an us problem.

We've had new clients come in via referral this year but that's literally it. Thinking of trying to do more in person as maybe people have migrated to something more authentic.

What are y'all seeing. Have you changed how you engage online.

Just want to preface with I've done my research, I have my little matrix with pros and cons to present, just want to see if anyone has additional boots on the ground advice.

I have a client implementation on Tableau right now for head office. They like it, we like them.

They're a professional membership org, think like andvocacy/lobby group for family doctors. ~400 active members.

They want a subset of our reports available to all members, knowing that true uptake will be about 10% of users weekly, maybe 60% quarterly.

Standard user based pricing kills this model.

Tableau has consumption based but according to my internet sleuthing we'd be looking at about $28k annually.

PowerBI comes in at about $11k but you need to turn it off over night (?) and manage some type of tokenization which doesn't scare me but sounds complex.

I'd love to go with looker studio but we require login driven security.

So... I have two somewhat less mainstream options on my list that claim to work, with ball park estimates (wont name cause dont want to sound promotional) but wondering if anyone has experience deploying a solve for this within your projects?

No sales plz.

Stupid story but client sent me an excel proving my math was wrong in pbi.

The excel was a straight export of my matrix and highlighted the undeniable fact that my numerator of 1 divided by my denominator of 6 did not equal my percentage score of 7.8%.

Valid.

So I opened er up and double checked the dax for my numerator. Looked fine. Checked the dax for my denominator. Looked fine. Checked the quotient, no problem.

Maybe a relationship?? No. Maybe pulling something accidentally in from the wrong table?

I was going insane. Everything was lining up. Nothing about my math seemed off, but despite how many times I put the numbers in the calculator I just could not get 7.8%. The math didn't change.

I don't know what finally made it click, but I Checked the number format. Added a decimal. 1 was actually 0.5. 6 was 6.4. 0.5/6.4 does, in fact, math out.

Stupid formatting. Stupid morning.