Hamel Husain explains why people get hooked on examining their data: repeated inspection delivers big payoffs, creating a reinforcement loop. Deep data analysis has little competition, making it uniquely valuable. Building a product without looking at the underlying data is misguided.
When people say to me, hey, can I just get an agent to look at all my traces? I don't always say this, but I almost always think maybe you shouldn't be building this product if you don't want to look at what's up in your data, right?
So, okay, like, I want to talk about that. Like, people might hear you say you're addicted to data and they think like Hugo is a maniac. And I would say no, Hugo is not a maniac. You feel that way because you have been rewarded So many times by looking at the data. You think you're addicted, but you have been rewarded every time you looked at the data. There's been like an extremely large payoff. And you also have learned that that is an activity that is like, there's not that much competition in there. You will do it and no one else is going to do it. And so those things combine, you're like, this is just insane. I'm just going to do this. It's like so much fun. Not necessarily in the process. I mean, we were mixing it up. There's just the payoff is so high that the whole thing is fun. There's a reason you are addicted.
