adrienne
@adrienne
Seeing Farcaster DAU chatter on my feed today and it's reminding me of the time I was put in charge of calculating user counts for a public b2b saas company. Active user counts were a big deal at the company. Founder and CEO talked about user counts a lot. Showed up in every slide deck, on our website home page.
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adrienne
@adrienne
The problem: it took 5 days to calculate. I was put in charge of business intelligence and my first task was to "automate user counts". CEO wanted a dashboard. But every earlier attempt led to "our data sucks" "we can't trust the dashboard"
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adrienne
@adrienne
Easy peasy, I thought. My engineering mind thinking it would be as simple as "select * from users where status = active" Only after weeks of research did I realize why it was taking so long to calculate. No one had ever defined exactly what it meant to be an active user...
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adrienne
@adrienne
Because we were reporting to Wall Street in our quarterly earnings report, we had to make sure we didn't include users from demo portals, test/QA clients, or clients that hadn't yet gone live. But we didn't track client status anywhere in a database; info was in various spreadsheets and in the COO's head.
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