Use great reporting to defend your dreams against the dying of the light.
In this article I explore how great reporting empowers great decisions and makes the difference between life and death of companies and the dreams of their founders. Along the way I'm figuring out how you can access great reporting for your company, without a million-dollar budget wasted on inefficient data-teams and reporting-tools.
You can only control what you see.
You can only understand what you can explore.
It took me 14 years to truly understand the superpower of our nerdy "sidecraft" as marketing-engineers and growth mechanics: THE SUPERPOWER OF REPORTING.
I always thought:
Everyone is doing this.
Everyone can do this.
Reporting is just a sidequest of the marketing game.
We need to do it, so we do it.
It's necessary to do great marketing, to control your cost, to pinpoint the solution to the scaling-puzzle, to understand where you stand, to understand where you want to go, and to understand how to get there.
It's a necessity, so we just do it.
And so we did it.
It dawned to me a few times along the journey that "this reporting thing" might be worth a little more than what we're charging.
But as ambitious and equally humble nerds we just did what's best for our beloved marketing systems, that we created and scaled for our clients.
We sorted, we structured, we named – we brought order to the chaos and literally sorted and mapped the growth engines of our clients.
Before us there was no map.
If there is no map, the we draw the map.
It's second nature to us.
We are marketing-mapping savants.
We start with a client.
We see their chaos.
We start mapping.
We start seeing patterns.
We see the beauty of the solution on the map we created.
It's like a glowing path through dark.
We can see it – and we see it faster and earlier than other people.
We often wondered why it's hard for others to see the solution – because we thought that others can perceive patterns like we do.
But they can't.
Not like us.
We are far ahead in the marketing mapping, pathfinding and puzzle-solving game.
That's why we are some of the few marketing consultants who actually deserve that title –
but we still behave like shy and humble nerds.
We sold our reporting underpriced for years and years and years.
We were fine with it – as it felt natural to us to SIMPLY SOLVE what needs to be solved.
We are helpful.
We are serving.
We are companions.
We are the fellowship of the startup-ring.
We are the best friends of founders on their quest to save Middle-earth, and if that way leads through Mordor, then we find the secret passage –
to unburden our clients –
from their burden –
which is –
to fulfill their vision.
Big companies can spend big money on big data teams, expensive tools, reporting infrastructure and fancy realtime dashboards.
Startups, small and medium-sized companies can not spend millions of dollars on a fancy reporting-system, but they still need great reporting to make great decisions.
Small companies need good reporting even more so than big companies – because every decision matters.
Successful startups need better reporting than big companies, with a smaller budget.
Now that's a challenge.
Accepted!
10 years ago the reporting was often outsourced to "the intern" and unskilled marketeers were trying to hide their lack of skills and actual understanding in an underreported mess – which they dared to call marketing. I never wanted to be that misleading marketeer, I always wanted to be a true marketeer who's aware of the truth – speaking it and sharing it. I was that intern doing the reporting that noone wanted to do – I was that intern who never stopped refining his reporting skill – and I now am that marketing savant who keeps refining his reporting skills to this day and ad infinitum. It's my nature.
One realization is: most people don't have the skill to sort out marketing, to bring order into the chaos, to structure a marketing setup, let alone to mastermind, architect and build a scalable marketing system.
We come from the opposite direction: we are natural sorters and system thinkers – and we apply that to marketing.
That's why we put mapping the system, tracking the signals and reporting the data first: that is the foundation of successful growth.
We map the territory, and then we decide on the path.
We are startup reporting superstars, because we use minimal resources to report exactly what you need to know for the next most important growth decision.
Then we iterate and and grow that reporting like a caring gardener, so that you can visit this data-garden every day, wander in it full of joy and taste the healthy fruits of great decisions.
Because that is what great reporting is made for: great decisions.
Great reporting enables great decisions.
Bad reporting results in bad situational awareness, bad decisions and dead companies.
Bad reporting results in dead dreams.
We work hard everyday to defend your dreams against the dying of the light.1
We are level 5 players and level everyone in our team to the minimum of level 3 players, according to the Triangle of Talent framework2:
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Initialized 2025-02-13.
Updated 2025-02-16
Footnotes
- "Rage, rage against the dying of the light." ↩︎
- Triangle of Talent framework blogpost and post on X. ↩︎