As a first mover in an industry as so many start-ups are, it is really critical to build your business in a way that limits the ability for others to copy it. One way to do this which most are aware of is to try and patent certain products, processes, or formulas. However, one of the more important, less costly, and more sustainable ways to do this is through building company data.
Your tracking of data and ability to turn your data into optimized decisions is something that no second mover can copy. Even if they enter your market, you would have created a situation synonymous to a car race in which your competitor has obscured vision and no GPS.
As long as you stay on top of it, you can permanently be ahead of your competitors as your ability to translate data into decisions only becomes stronger with time - ensuring that they never really catch-up.
While decisions can be made with best guess assumptions and we often use this as a useful starting point, it will be a substandard decision making process. It is well advised to always understand what learnings you would like from anything you do and ensure the data that you are tracking matches up to this. Too many times, this gets done too late as companies don't build systems with this type of foresight.
As markets become more and more saturated and computing power/techniques become more and more advanced, data interpretation is truly the way of the future. This ability will only make the value of your data go up, increasing the value of your company. At the same time, it will decrease the value of your company if you lack the data to use in the first place.
In summary, organize and track data at each level - at the customer level, the internal operational level, the supplier level, the financial level, and the human resource level - but also design your systems with the foresight to be able to collect the data that you need in order to learn the lessons that you want to learn. AND lastly create that necessary feedback loop in a formal manner to capture the value.
Best,
Lawrence Brown
Managing Consultant | AngelytiX Consulting