Our Story

Hey there, 

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I want to take this opportunity to share our story with you – hope it resonates!
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For starters, I’d like you to know that this isn't an “About Us” page where I just describe what databeats is – this is the story of how databeats came to be, what it is today, and where it’s headed.

I’m Arpit Choudhury and I’ve been working at the intersection of data and media since early 2020 when I launched my first side project, Data-led Academy (DLA) where I published a series of guides for growth and product people to understand customer data infrastructure (CDI) for product analytics and related use cases. At the time, I was leading growth at Integromat (now Make), a SaaS company that offered an integration platform (iPaaS) that was growing rapidly. Integromat was a bootstrapped startup that operated super lean which gave me the opportunity to take the lead on implementing our own CDI with the help of two of our ace engineers (we didn’t have a data team).

How is this relevant?

Because databeats is an evolution of what started as DLA, which was an outcome of my desire to share everything I’d learned doing data-powered growth at Integromat.

In my journey from DLA to databeats, I experimented with several ideas – a podcast that ran out of steam, a forum that went dormant, a marketplace to connect data technology brands with data content creators, a directory of data tools (that became hard to maintain as companies evolved, got acquired, or shut down), and several iterations of my newsletter which, combined with my latest video show, became databeats. 

And DLA ended up getting acquired by Amplitude.

I want you to know that databeats is a culmination of many failed experiments, and like any early-stage startup working toward product-market fit, databeats will continue to experiment with new initiatives to land on the right mix of offerings that help us execute our vision and take us closer to our mission.

Why do we exist?

databeats exists to realize a vision and get closer to a mission.

Mission

‍To beat the gap between data people and non-data people for good. 

That’s the mission and it can mean different things to different people depending on whether they identify as a data person or a non-data person. I believe we will get closer to our mission as more people begin to identify as data people, irrespective of their job titles.

Vision

Our vision is to enable every organization to go turn data into growth. 

It's taken a few years for me to arrive at the thesis for this vision – here it is in simple terms:

1. Predictable, measurable, and sustainable growth cannot happen without a robust data foundation.
2. A robust data foundation is no good if it doesn't lead to growth.
3. To turn data into growth, organizations need to enable data and growth people to think like each other.

Now we just need to figure out how to turn this vision into reality. 

What exactly are we building?

databeats is a media company and learning community serving professionals working at the intersection of data and growth. 

There are three key elements that can together help us realize our vision and take us closer to our mission. Everything we do essentially falls under one of these elements: 

Accessible Content

Our content is optimized for resonance rather than reach, but at the same time, it reaches people across 96 countries. And our biggest priority is to make our content accessible so that we can expand the pool of data-savvy professionals across the globe.

Most of what we produce is available for free and we don’t aim to change that. Even though we will offer paid products going forward, we will continue publishing free content and keep improving discoverability and the reading experience on our website.

Brand Partnerships

While we take pride in bringing a neutral point of view in everything we create, we also work with data technology brands that wanted to reach our audience via BrandJams – interview-style video content co-produced by databeats and our brand partners, as well as occasional ads in our flagship newsletter, The Backbeat.

I can vouch for the fact that folks building data tools and technologies have a ton of knowledge that they’re eager to share, and as a media company operating in this niche, databeats aims to provide a platform for those individuals to share their stories – to tell people why they chose the problems they set out to solve, and what makes them the right people to be solving those problems.

Our collective goal with these partnerships is to educate our shared audiences while also enabling our partners to build brand awareness. We try our best to limit marketing jargon and always make it explicit when a piece of content is sponsored or co-produced.

Learning Membership

At the time of writing this, we don’t offer a space for you to go beyond consuming our content – to ask questions related to your current data and growth challenges, share insights with peers, learn from experienced practitioners, and to gather feedback on experiments and ideas.

Well, the good news is that this is in the works – we've been testing out different versions of a minimum viable community (MVC) and seeing some promising signs. We’ve been very intentional about not spinning up yet another Slack community because our goal is not to just bring people together for the sake of it. We’re trying to solve a difficult problem here and want to make sure that what we offer is extremely valuable and highly personalized for our members. 

If you're interested in joining one of our beta community spaces, you can reach out to me on LinkedIn