As I mentioned in the previous post in this series, we’re sharing bi-weekly progress reports to update you on the highs and lows of our product, content, and business development.

Here is our progress for the weeks of 3/6 and 3/13:

Product development

Highs: Last month we began our search for an experienced full-stack developer to lead our front-end development and design. Well, we found one and are excited to welcome Sarah Ruane to the team as our new front-end development lead! With more than 10 years of experience with HTML, CSS3, and AngularJS, Sarah will be helping us design and implement an interactive UI/UX that abstracts away all the friction points of data analytics to focus on what SMB owners really care about — actionable business insights. She will be working directly with Bill (our CEO/co-founder) and John Sun (our visual designer) to develop an intuitive, human-centered user interface. We look forward to showcasing her work shortly with our upcoming beta testing!

Lows: As you may know, Bill has taken the lead on developing the data infrastructure for our analytics platform on the back-end. Unfortunately, he has been sick for the past couple of weeks so that has somewhat slowed down our product development. Thankfully, he’s starting to feel better!

Goals: We’re looking forward to releasing a MVP soon to start beta testing! As we’ve mentioned, it will be the first module of our lean analytics web app, which will utilize your google analytics website data in order to deliver actionable business insights about your website and its visitors. John, our visual designer, is creating the graphics from scratch, and he’s now finished with the first round of mockups. Sign up for our newsletter (or email us at bill@humanlytics.co) if you’d like to test out the beta for free (with your website data). We’d love to get your feedback!

Content development

Highs: we’ve implemented a content calendar with the following weekly blog series:

1. Mondays: Data Points with Zach — a weekly industry news digest highlighting the week’s must-read articles in digital marketing and data analytics.

2. Tuesdays: Progress report — a biweekly update on Humanlytics product, content, and business development (what you’re currently reading).

3. Wednesdays: Think piece — a thought leadership article from different Humanlytics team members discussing the “big picture” of why data is critical to SMBs, what the main challenges are, and how to solve them. We will often focus on current events and what’s happening in the world of data.

4. Thursdays: Google Analytics Fundamentals with Bill — a tutorial on how to turn your Google analytics website data into actionable business insights about your visitors, marketing channels, and website user experience. If you are an ecommerce SMB owner and don’t know where to start with data, this is a great opportunity to use a free tool (Google Analytics) that will help your website maximize impressions, engagement, and conversions.

5. Fridays: Email digest — we’ll send an email digest with all of our content from the week to our newsletter mailing list and beta testers

Lows: Bill, Zach, and Patrick have all been traveling for the past couple of weeks, so our content-writing capacity has been more limited this sprint.

Goals: we’re looking forward to incorporating more visual assets in our blog posts to align our content strategy with our core principle of human-centered design

Business development

SUP-X (the Startup Expo)

Bill and John attended SUP-X (the Startup Expo) from 3/6–3/7 in Fort Lauderdale to get feedback and validation from early-stage startup founders.

• We talked to 30+ companies. Most of them were founders/CEOs creating apps and ecommerce products. Shout out to Ricardo Jose Bueso, cofounder of the THX Co, one of the many companies that volunteered to beta test our prototype.

• Our main takeaway was that small businesses often prioritize operations and don’t have the resources to pay for traditional consulting tools or services. We were surprised by how much need there is for an analytics tool like the one we’re developing.

• Our next step is to develop strategic partnerships with incubators as a more efficient way to reach more startups.

Digital marketing

• So far we’ve acquired 564 followers on twitter, 181 likes on Facebook, and 1352 views on Medium. If you haven’t already, please follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Medium to help us spread the idea of data-driven SMBs!

As we’ve mentioned, we’re publishing these progress reports every other Tuesday, so look for our next one on Tuesday 4/4. Thanks!

Action Items

Sign up for our newsletter (or email us at bill@humanlytics.co) if you’d like to test out the beta for free (with your website data). We’d love to get your feedback!

Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Medium to help us help small businesses become more data-driven!

Shoot us an email at bill@humanlytics.co if you have any feedback, suggestions, or questions on our content. We’re not just building software and writing content — we also want to become the go-to online community for forward-thinking SMBs looking to be more data-driven. In order for that to happen, we need your help. Thanks!