How I broke into data and how it broke me
My Affair with Software - Part 3
👋 Hi friend,
Welcome to Part 3 of the essay with which I’m relaunching the databeats newsletter in 2025. Here’s Part 2:
So this is the story of how I broke into data and became one of the highest-paid content creators in the data SaaS space. But that’s not all. This is also the story of my frustrations and the realization that most people building SaaS should be doing something else altogether.
By now it should be evident that I love using software. If I come across a problem and I know a tool exists that can help solve it, I’m bound to try it out, and if successful, I’m bound to become an advocate. My passion for software, willingness to provide feedback to builders, and desire to help others evaluate and adopt tools gradually led to strong relationships with many founders and operators at early and mid-stage data and martech startups.
Here’s the backstory:
It was July of 2019 and Integromat was growing rapidly. We were getting over a thousand new users every day but lacked the infrastructure to make sense of the data being generated. I had just gone from leading education and community to leading growth, and my first project was to set up our data infra. Thankfully, our founders were in no rush which afforded me the opportunity to spend almost two months exploring the data tooling landscape and evaluating a host of products to collect, analyze, and act upon our customer data.
This was an enriching experience because I learned so much about the data space which, at the time, was blossoming with new tools and technologies. After deploying the data stack at Integromat, I had a strong urge to share everything I had learned in the process which led to Data-led Academy (DLA), my first blog where I published a series of guides to help sem-technical, non-data people learn all about customer data infrastructure. This turned out to be the best decision of my work life as it opened up many opportunities down the road.
As an early member of Locally Optimistic (LO), a popular data community, I befriended as many founders as I could and spent significant time talking to them about the problems they set out to solve. While at it, I also tried to understand why those founders were the right people to be solving those problems.
Why were they eager to talk to me? Well, because they knew that I knew what I was talking about, thanks to the guides I published on DLA.
By now, I was one of the more active members of the LO community and was often the first to answer questions related to data collection, product analytics, and customer data platforms. This was also the case in a couple of other communities; I would track all relevant keywords and answer questions as quickly as they come in.
It’s worth mentioning that I stayed within my circle of competence which led me to become known for something specific – customer data infrastructure and related tools.
Integromat continued to grow but I became more interested in working with data companies. And as luck would have it, companies were also interested in working with me. I’d like to believe that luck played a significant role here because I found myself at the right place at exactly the right time.
That said, things didn’t go quite as planned.
I quit Integromat, joined a data startup, quit and joined a tinier data startup, quit again and decided to go independent – all within eight months. It was a heck of a learning experience. I learned so much not only about the data landscape but also about my own interests and abilities.
Over the next 3 years, I worked with a dozen data companies in various capacities, sold DLA to a public tech company, and created a data community, a tools directory, and a marketplace of sorts, wasn’t able to make any of those work, started a YouTube show called databeats which became much more than the show, paused the show indefinitely, wrote my first book called Good Data To Growth (GDG), joined and quit another data startup, and finally, got completely burned out.
Looking back, for someone like me, burnout was inevitable; I’ll share more about it in the next part of this essay.
However, going independent still turned out to be a good decision and I don’t regret it one bit. Sure, I would have made significantly more money had I continued working at the startup I’d quit. But for me, the space to do high-quality, impactful work is way more important than money will ever be.
I acknowledge that this statement comes from a place of privilege. In fact, quitting a well-paying gig to go independent is a huge privilege in itself and I’m grateful to have found myself in that position.
Today, I happen to know many people who are utterly burned out or frustrated in their jobs but quitting is not an option for them – something that makes me real sad. Because these are good, hard-working people who just want to do quality work, have a positive impact, and gain a little bit of recognition. Is that too much to ask for in exchange for putting your heart and soul into helping others succeed?
I understand that for a lot of folks – maybe for most – work is just work and they’re satisfied doing only what’s necessary, which is completely fine. But as long as their intentions aren’t skewed, they too deserve to be recognized for their contribution, don’t they?
I can’t speak for other industries but I don’t see very many people gaining recognition for their work in the software industry, especially at regular companies – those that aren’t experiencing explosive growth. Or in other words, every company barring a handful of hypergrowth startups. I can’t help but think about the root cause of this phenomenon; even though I don’t yet have answers, I’m keen to find out.
For the sake of this essay though, I’ll stick to my story of burnout, and what’s next for databeats.