Draft Ideas — Content Seeds

Summary

A collection of article seeds and content ideas from Ray’s early thinking about Ray Data Co positioning. Several of these map directly to newsletter topics. The through-line: processes are leverage, data creates transparency, and complexity is a choice.

Article Seeds

Processes Are Leverage

Processes are high leverage — once you set them up, the incremental cost goes to zero. Do once, benefit forever. Building processes frees you up to take on the next challenge, to focus on the important things. People spend too much time working through the same problems over and over again.

Processes need to be focused on the intended goal. When a better approach is invented, you update the process.

Stop Waiting on Your Prince Charming

No vendor, no consultant, nobody is going to care as much about your company as you. The hard work will not complete itself. No system fixes everything.

Key principles:

• Always maintain your own record outside of a vendor. If a vendor doesn’t provide access to your data, they’re using it to keep themselves entrenched.
• Acquisitions break assumptions. New businesses have different systems and configurations that need weaving into your reporting.
• Migration is real. Switching systems doesn’t mean starting from day zero — legacy data needs a home.

The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data

• Lock in your model
• Lock in your grain
• Improve the quality of your signal (are inputs wrong repeatedly? how do you add guardrails that don’t slow down a sales rep?)

Build Empathy with Data

Be numbers-driven, but remember there are people on the other side of those numbers. Don’t tighten screws to squeeze more profit — that’s greedy. As Derek Sivers says: “I miss the mob — as long as more was coming in than going out, everything was fine.”

Complexity Is a Choice

Reducing your business’s choices. (Seed only — needs development.)

Correct vs. Consistent

Ops vs. Accounting mindset. Are you allowed to change the past even if the new version is more correct? (Also noted in Writing Thoughts.)

The Role of Metrics and Leadership

Leadership is about guiding your team through how much to worry about a problem. Metrics help leaders see where the problem is quickly, trace back root cause, and monitor the success of their response.

MRR Series Outline

A full content series:

1. What is MRR?
2. How do you classify by item or SKU?
3. Rolling items up to plans, products, and license types
4. Defining retention actions (reactivated customers, expansion types, churn thresholds)
5. Defining retention metrics
6. Annualizing MRR (the wrong way, the right way, how to think of ARR as MRR times 12)

About Page Framing

Mission: unlock people’s ability to create and build businesses and products by teaching them to connect and automate their processes. Everything is a process of taking things from lower value to higher value. Focus on helping the analyst who can instrument, monitor, and architect improvements.

Borrow Matt Wedding’s principle: “Reward process, not results.”

Connection to Diamandis’ 6 D’s

Data is used to build transparency. Data allows you to digitize your business. Digitization is the first of Peter Diamandis’ 6 D’s of Exponentials — could write a whole series on taking a company through exponential growth.