Using your personal credit to fund your business is like putting liquefied asparagus into your sedan’s gas tank. “It makes sense,” you reason, “since liquefied asparagus is really good for my body and makes me feel all healthy and strong, it must do the same for my car!” Wrong. You are forgetting one very important [...]
Michael Porter, the business genius-guru of our time, defines a “competitive advantage” thus: “The coordination of activities that are not easily duplicated” Do enough of these “not easily duplicated coordinated activities” and you are going to find your business vaulting above the competition like you never thought possible. And to get you started, here is [...]
The Vlookup Have you ever had to compare two lists of email addresses? How about flag a certain set of products out of a large transaction list? Or maybe mash up a few lists of ugly-looking customer IDs? This function will allow you to do all of it! Lets take the example of two lists [...]
In the presence of perfect information, there is no need for analytics. In fact, the whole aim of analytics, with all its methods, models, algorithms, and statistics, is to get as close to perfect information as possible (or, better said, as close as necessary). The analytics professional would do well to keep this aim in [...]
Analytics is a hard subject to learn well. It involves the bringing together of several disciplines, such as statistics, business strategy, machine learning, data base management, computer science, etc. It will therefore be necessary for the analyst to have a firm grasp and understanding of all of these topics and more – a daunting task, [...]
What kind of analytics are people willing to pay for? That’s a fair question – it shows, perhaps, where there is greatest need and where one might successfully start up a business. Let’s answer that question with a little analytics ourselves. First, we need a data set. Where might we find data on the kinds [...]
Let’s take a moment and consider one of the more interesting of the pricing models – the auction. And to see this model at its full potential, we’ll want to analyze the real world example of the company that got auctioning right, and is currently leveraging it to pull in billions of dollars every quarter: [...]
Done right, the first step to doing good analytics has nothing to do with math or calculations or equations – these come later. The first step is taking time to understand the problem that is to be solved, who it’s being solved for, and what the context of the situation is. Don’t let the impatient [...]
Let’s say I have an idea for a new product I want to take to market, and I want to understand (naturally) what the price points for this particular product might be. Let’s pretend further, for the sake of having an example, that my new product is a fiction book. I may say to [...]
