March 19, 2024
We’re building Wallabi for the 75% of people overlooked by existing solutions. Who are they exactly? And are you one of them?
In a recent blog, I shared that only 25% of employees in the average organization use business intelligence (BI) and analytics tools. This figure, known as the BI barrier, reveals the industry’s inability to support business leaders who can benefit from data-driven insights but are not data professionals themselves. Does that sound like you? If so, then you’re part of the 75% of the workforce that BI and analytics vendors have ignored.
Think of the last “data tool” you used. Perhaps it was the analytics add-on for your Shopify site or HubSpot instance. Or it was a dashboard your data team or BI consultant threw together in Tableau or Looker. Ask yourself: “Does this feel like it was built for me?” As you look at widgets and tabs with labels like measures, dimensions, tables, joins, and modeling, did you feel like those tools were speaking your language? Did you feel confident in your ability to use them? Did those tools understand and adapt to you, or was it the other way around?
There’s an alarming scarcity of options available to you, the 75%. If you’re a sales & marketing professional, the founder of a small startup, the head of Operations, Human Resources, or any other non-IT function, you’ll either have to burn a good chunk of your limited budget on data experts, or you’ll be stuck with products that weren’t designed for you. Regardless of the option you choose, the result will be the same: more dashboards. BI vendors have been unable to come up with anything other than dashboards as a way to support you and your urgent need for data-driven insights.
It’s clear that what has worked for the 25% won’t work for the 75%. The solution is not more dashboards, search boxes, or chatbots. To quote my former boss, “Great software is an act of empathy”. If we want to help you, we must first understand you. We must understand the tasks you perform, the business goals you care about, the applications you use, the people you work with, and the way you consume information.
The clearest definition I’ve heard came from a dear colleague during a dinner conversation in San Francisco nearly ten years ago. He described the 75% as “the people who need data to do their work, but their work isn’t data.” This definition, simultaneously concise and comprehensive, underlines the fact that the vast majority of the population are not data professionals.
Simply stated, this group wants answers, not dashboards.
But the 75% are not a monolithic, homogeneous group. You’re a richly diverse collection of different personas, each with distinct roles, tasks, tools, business questions, and data consumption habits. One of Wallabi’s guiding principles is to recognize this diversity, so we’ve spent months talking to customers like you and learning about your business goals and challenges.
To understand who we’re building Wallabi for, let’s take a look at some of the personas that make up the 75%. Perhaps you’ll see yourself in some of these. Or maybe you think we’ve missed you. By no means is this meant to be a comprehensive list, and we’d love your feedback as we continue our customer research.
You’re Gabby if you identify as a growth professional, also known as a growth hacker or growth maverick. You’re an expert on driving business expansion and utilizing strategies in marketing, sales, and product development to enhance your company’s market presence and customer base.
You typically work in a Marketing, Product, or Sales team. You have a job title like VP of Growth, Director of Growth Marketing, Growth Product Manager, or Digital Marketing Manager, to name a few.
Your tech stack is extensive. It generally consists of email marketing and social media automation tools (Marketo, Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign, Hootsuite, Sprout Social), SEO and content marketing tools (SEMRush, Ahrefs, Google Adwords, Squarespace, Wix, Medium, Substack), advertising platforms (Google Ads, Facebook Ads Manager, LinkedIn Ads), and audience engagement platforms (Twitter, LinkedIn, Substack, Medium, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram).
Your function is very data-driven, and you make decisions every day that help drive your company’s growth. For that reason, you need insights that help you understand your business across several areas. You want help with questions like:
Fiona is the founder of a small but growing business, working daily to establish a strong market presence and deliver a viable product. If you’re Fiona, many of your initiatives are aimed at finding product-market fit, identifying the right target audience, and getting the most you can out of your limited resources.
You’re a hands-on leader who wears multiple hats, from product development to marketing strategy. Without the luxury of a dedicated BI tool, you rely heavily on spreadsheets for data analysis. Your toolset includes platforms such as Google Analytics for website traffic analysis, Excel or Google Sheets for financial modeling and customer data analysis, Mailchimp for email marketing campaigns, and social media platforms (LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter) for brand awareness and community engagement.
To move your business forward, you need to answer critical questions, such as:
Brian leads a business unit within a medium to large organization. As Business Brian, you’re accountable for the growth of your area and the performance of your team. Your role demands a balance between strategic thinking and tactical execution, making the most of opportunities to increase revenue and optimize processes.
Your tech stack consists of platforms specific to your business function. For example, in e-commerce, you use tools like Shopify and Google Analytics. If you’re a logistics manager, you rely on solutions like NetSuite and SAP. In Human Resources, you use products like Workday, SuccessFactors, and Gusto.
Your team also has access to traditional BI tools and dashboards, supplied by either an internal IT or data team or external consultants, but you face significant challenges. The complexity of these tools hamper your team’s ability to perform analytics independently, leading to a reliance on consultants or IT for data insights, which slows down the decision-making process.
As Brian, you need answers to key questions like:
We’re building Wallabi specifically for you, the 75%. Learning from our customers has been one of the most enjoyable aspects of our journey, and it profoundly influences how we think about building an analytics solution that can finally break through the BI barrier.
The more we’ve gotten to know Growth Gabbies, Founder Fionas, and Business Brians, the clearer it becomes that you care about business outcomes, not dashboards. You think of data analysis as a means to an end, not a goal in and of itself. That doesn’t mean it’s not important. It means it’s not where you want to dedicate your time and brainpower. You’re a business leader with limited time and, given the choice, you will always prefer to focus on how to grow your business instead of how to build data pipelines.
Does this resonate with you? If you identify yourself with Gabby, Fiona, or Brian, or if you think we’re not describing you at all, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us, or join Wallabi’s early access program and help us shape the future of BI and analytics.
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