By the Numbers

Welcome to Rework, a podcast by thirty seven Signals about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes joined by the co founders of thirty seven Signals, Jason Fried and David Heinemeier, Hansen. This week, we're talking a little bit about analytics. What we look at, what we don't. We don't have a full time analyst here at thirty seven Signals. A lot of small businesses don't, but we did have that role at one time. So that we talk a little bit about that transition and what numbers we look at now. So, Jason, why don't we start with you? This role of just a full time analyst. We've had it. We don't have it. Kind of talk me through that transition. Yes. We've had two in our history. We first hired one because we thought we should. Like, we should know what the hell is going on. Actually, the the initial idea was, like, I think there was a story with Facebook figured out that if someone clicks this or uploads a photo or something, it, like, led to something. We're like, we should figure out what that thing is for us. What is the engagement thing? And to do that, we need to analyze probably a lot of data. And it seemed like a really good hunt and really interesting thing. So we hired a fellow named Noah, who was fantastic at this, like, awesome at this. And he was with us for a number of years. And then he left for a variety of other reasons, and we just didn't hire anyone immediately, I think. Then we eventually hired someone else named Jane, and she was with us for a while as well. And she left, and we kinda realized, like, at that point, we didn't really need someone again. Because what we found is that we're we had this initial insight or this not even insight, but this curiosity, about, like, would there be a trigger? Would there be a thing that if we did this and we did that, and we could look at all this data? And then we found out that we could look at more data and look at more data and look at more data. It turns out, like, it didn't really affect much of what we're doing in the end. There's a lot of data you can look at, a lot of data you can mine, a lot of stuff you can analyze. But, ultimately, if that's just the work that you're doing and you're not really using that information so much, maybe we don't need to do that. Maybe we could occasionally have someone look into something if we need someone to look into something occasionally, but it doesn't need to be a full time job. There wasn't really enough work to make this a full time job, in a way that we could we could use it. So now we have Ron who …