Cameron HeroldFounder of the COO Alliance & Invest In Your Leaders Training

Scrappy Beats Fancy: How to Scale Without Expensive Tools | GrowthAssistant (Podcast 480)

5 Jun 2025 · 1 min

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Short excerpt from a GrowthAssistant podcast episode where the speaker advises small companies and startups to 'bootstrap' their data setups rather than wait for sophisticated warehouses/BI tools. Emphasizes pragmatic, scrappy approaches: make existing software systems talk to each other, stitch data from multiple sources, and use shared codes/identifiers across tools (example: same code used in HubSpot, ClickUp, ATS, payroll) to enable cross-system tracking and analysis.

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I think as a small company and as a startup, you kind of bootstrap together what you can on the data side and then it becomes more of a priority over time. So I think it's okay if you're a small company and you don't have the most sophisticated data warehouse, data lake and a BI tool on top of that, and you're using sort of the tools that you grew up with as a company. The other thing I would say is what I think we've done a good job at is finding like sort of scrappier ways to make these tools more useful in absence of like, you know, a whole data warehouse. Making sure that the softwares are all talking to each other and we're able to make sense of data and stitch it together from different sources. One thing that is is helpful is having shared codes or identifiers that live across the different softwares. You know, in HubSpot, we have the same code that is showing up in ClickUp, which is showing up in our ats, in our payroll software, et cetera.