There's a whole different story of your business that you can narrate using your data the right way

Hello and welcome to this episode of The Unnoticed Entrepreneur. Today we're actually going to Austin, Texas, and we're going to talk to Ahmed Elsamaa, DC, who's going to talk about the definitions game and about data and why people make bad decisions with data and why he's passionate about helping entrepreneurs to make the right decisions using their data. Ahmed, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me, Jim. I'm excited to be here.

Well, I'm excited to have you because a whole new area, data, not my strong suit. Now you're the founder of a company called Narrator and you help with data. Why don't you explain the pitfalls that entrepreneurs and business owners get into with data and how they can use data to build a better business?

Great question. So we'll start with the pitfalls. Data is one of those fields That everybody's talking about and everyone is trying to sell you something. So even me, I'm trying to sell you something here too. So like take everything I say with a grain of salt. But the first thing about data is a lot of misinformation and everyone is trying to say use data. So I think the first common pitfall is that entrepreneurs use data earlier than they should. I have this really interesting view where Using data that is bad is pretty much way worse than not using data at all. So here's an example. When people have bad data, they are more confident because they think they're data-driven. So they actually run faster in the wrong decision. When people don't have data at all, they're more cautious, they're more aware, they're more alert. So they're not running the wrong decision, but they might be starting the wrong decision and they might notice something and change their decision. So unless you're ready to really invest in data, I recommend just keep your bottom line metrics. And then as data evolves, you want to kind of invest more and more in doing data correctly.

And, you know, you said that about data and investing in data. Most entrepreneurs try and have a dashboard at some stage, whether it's for marketing or for sales, for logistics. You talked about the definitions game in data and how that leads entrepreneurs to make the wrong decisions based on definition of of data that aren't really accurate. Can you help us to explain, you know, what you mean by that and what risks are we taking by making decisions on bad definitions?

Yeah. Awesome. So every company that is packaging data for you in a beautiful little bundle that's like, we simplify data, are doing something that you don't realize, which is they're abstracting away data and putting words to express data. Often these words sound like something, but they mean something different, or they sound like something and it makes sense. But when you think a lot more deeper into it, it doesn't. This is very notoriously known for like in big examples like Facebook, which had been sued almost every single year for misleading customers with words like total watches. You're like, oh, of course I know what a watch is. Somebody watched the video. Did they? What if they scroll past it? Is that considered a watch? If they click on it, it starts and they pause it in 1 second, is that a watch? How Facebook defines a watch. Same thing happens with ROI. People see return on investment, or people say this person came from AdWords. What does that mean that they were attributed to AdWords? Google won't tell you how they figured out their attribution model. It's proprietary. But how do they know that you came from AdWords? Because you bought and they're like, These kind of comp— when you look at funnels and tools like Amplitude, is that the first-time funnel? Is that the recurring? There's all these questions that when you start thinking about, you start realizing that data doesn't mean anything. We've actually at Narrator do this really fun analysis, which is saying, how many times are you double-counted? And we run this analysis for customers where we show them that a single sale can be reported 4 times in your Klaviyo or your email marketing tool. can be reported like 6 times in your ad tool, the same sale can be attributed to Facebook, Google, and like other ad sources, and your email clients. So everyone is getting credit and thinking that they got this sale, when it doesn't make sense. There's like a joke, if you sum up all the sales of all your ad companies promising you, and all your email marketing tools, you're gonna get way more sales than you actually got. Because definitions are being manipulated. And you're missing that key place. So whenever you look at data, and this is a big thing about entrepreneurs, like, and it's something that data analysts are incredible at, like they're used to questioning, well, what does it actually mean? What does it actually mean? Do you know what it actually means? Because so often we don't. And companies have taken advantage of that incredibly for them to make a lot of money and for you to make the wrong decision because you see something and like, You end up making a decision that takes your company in the completely wrong way. Maybe I'll give another example of that quickly of the wrong decision. Let's say we were just talking about people's behavior in like purchasing. So you look at a funnel, somebody comes to your site and buys. Now, if that funnel, if you're looking at funnel over time, people are coming to your site and buying 80%. If it's looking at their conversion rate from any person, whenever they first come. To when they first buy, then as time goes by, your conversion rate can like look the same, but it could be people who are currently buying or people who have bought in the past, or it could be early funnels. So you could be actually getting way worse, but your overall looks the same. If it's based on every time someone comes to your site, then if someone comes to your site 4 times in the same day, and then they buy, is that good or bad? Then the conversion rate is 25%. It's these kinds of questions that when you're looking at something as simple as a funnel, you want to know, because it can tell you that you're good. It can tell you that you are good. It can tell you that you're doing something bad right now, or you do something much better right now. And because you don't know what that funnel is telling you, you can make 4 different decisions to go back and undo or redo or change. And that will lead to something outside of the ordinary happening.

Well, Ahmed, so you've now made me feel pretty insecure about trusting any of the data I've got in any of the systems, but Tell us then, how do you get transparency and what's Narrator's point of view? I mean, I know we've said that, you know, everyone's selling something, but you know, this show, we're not in sales mode, but we are trying to find the right tool. So what does Narrator do? What's your approach that makes it different?

Yeah. So we allow people to, we standardize all of data into a simple format that humans can understand, which is your customers doing stuff in time. At any given row of data, when you're kind of assembling your data to try to think about this funnel. We show you all the raw data and allow you to zoom in on any single row and see exactly what that customer did in time. We call this building intuition. What that means is that as you see, you can refine your question by seeing a bunch of example customers and what they did. And you're like, oh, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, I don't want to count this one because this person came in like— and by seeing example customer journeys, not just total aggregations, by being able to get down to the root level. You will refine your question. And by us making the way you connect data to be standardized, we use something called relationships, which is human way of combining data. It allows you to control what you're actually getting and get that transparency. So you're able to look at some piece of data and say, how is this actually defined and how is it assembled? With one click, you can see that. You can dive into example journeys to fully understand what the customer really did, and you can refine and iterate. And that's the key thing. We don't just give you a bottom line metric like total sales and you have to figure out, like you have no way of knowing what that means. So that's kind of a couple of things that Narrator does to really empower you to understand your data.

Okay. So you've talked about being able to understand the different parts of the journey, presumably, you know, where they first maybe saw your advert or maybe read an article or clicked on a link somewhere. One of the challenges with dashboards and data is that they give you a metric, but not necessarily any prescription on what you should do with that data. And you've talked about helping humans to make better decisions. Does Narrator help at that next level? Because for many entrepreneurs, you've got the data and it's kind of like, so what? I know I've got this. Do I do more of that? Do I do less of that? How do you solve that central problem of strategy? Yeah.

So I really believe that nothing has led to more bad decisions than dashboards. Like, I think it's the enemy of all datum. And the reason dashboards are really fun because they allow the tool to kind of be non-responsible. So companies that sell you dashboarding tools, BI tools, they're not responsible for anything. They're like, hey, I just gave you a tool. You put the data in there, you put it, you can do whatever you want. And that level of it's not my fault allows people to like, it's all subjective to how people are using it. And their nature is to make you build more dashboards and more plots. Like that's how they make money. So they kind of, the UI and everything is nudging you to do that. When I started Narrator, I was very angry at the dashboarding world and I vowed to do it differently. So Narrator, our objective is not to get you to view dashboards. Our objective is to get you to take action. And when we flip that objective to get you to take action, we've learned a bunch of stuff. One, for you to take action, you must be able to read. Similar to the best way we've all learned to take actions, which consultants have been doing for a while. Is by telling coherent, consistent, fact evidence-based stories. And that's what a narrative is. When our narrative starts with a real question, it gives you a clear recommendation that you can actually do something with. It's not like get more leads. It's move people from this campaign to this other campaign. Like it helps you understand what you're going to learn. And then through English, where it gives the conclusion upfront, explains to you how it's making a decision, gives you the plots and the visualizations as evidence in a consistent way helps you walk through the story and learn why Narrator is making that recommendation. It feels like someone literally wrote a story for you. And what we see our customers do is that they're able to do 2 things. One, they're able to get actually action done based on the data because they're able to explain to the rest of the world how like that data came to be. So we did this, we did this, we did this, we checked for this, we checked for this, we checked for this. Computers just can do all that stuff for you faster. And we spend a lot of time helping you be able to read it and interpret it. 2, people literally print them out. Like, you don't print out dashboards, but you print out stories and you say, here's the story that explains to you why I'm thinking of making this decision. And that's kind of the biggest uniqueness of Narrator is you're not getting dashboards, you're getting stories. And you can see that in all sorts of things.

Yeah. So when you say a story, on the whole, an entrepreneur will have an instinct or maybe have a consultant or an agency. Or an in-house person saying, I think we should do this next, invest in this trade show or this virtual show or so on. Are you saying Narrator actually kind of gives some prescriptive advice in a format that might almost be a topic of discussion amongst a management team?

Yes, exactly. Exactly that. And Narrator doesn't, again, Narrator doesn't ask questions, doesn't give you like, hey, by the way, here's some fun facts. Narrator is letting you ask questions. Like, as an entrepreneur, you are an expert. Like, you're doing this business and your intuition is pretty damn good. Like, there was this— my mentor used to always say, if data is super surprising to the person who's on the ground, then the data's wrong. Assume the data's wrong because the person on the ground has really good intuition. What they're really bad at is quantifying that intuition of like how bad or how good something is. So what Narrator allows you to do is helps you take those intuition and as you ask real questions, helps you understand how to quantify it, how to understand its impact and how to observe it and how to monitor it in time. So it's doing all that work for you so that you can actually have that discussion and can make the best decision.

And what's the source of the data that Narrator is acquiring? Are you plugging into multiple ERM, CRM systems? Is that where the data is coming from or you expect people to You know, upload spreadsheets themselves.

Yeah. So one of the benefits of Narrator is Narrator actually is not about taking your data at all. So we actually do everything without data ever leaving your system. We're what are called warehouse native. So what does that mean? Your Shopify, your CRM tool, your Salesforce all has the data you use. Narrator helps you— Narrator through our partners helps you take that data. And dump it into like a big database. Imagine like a big folder structure, and you own that. It's in your system. You can use that data now. And what Narrator is doing is taking that data and restructuring it so that it makes sense, so you can use it to answer questions. And we're providing a way for you to ask and answer questions with that data. All that data still stays in your system. You can see everything Narrator is doing. You can turn it off. You can control it. Anything it's done, you can keep going. and not use Narrator, but we keep the data in your system using your data. There's no external data being used, and there's nothing outside of data that you already have. And you'll be surprised, as I don't know if you know this, but you have a lot more data than you think, because every system that has your data has a way to get the data out, and there's tools available that can take the data out for you instantly. And if you use Narrator, we can help you take all that data and move it to a place that you control. Wow.

what we used to call sort of almost middleware, right? So you're aggregating data into a super layer that you can actually use. That's absolutely fantastic. Now, you yourself are an entrepreneur. You've been named in the Forbes 30 Under 30. How have you been building Narrator as a brand? As you know, I love what you're doing, but I also love to find out from entrepreneurs how they've been building their own brand. So you wanna just tell us a little bit about how you've been doing that?

Yeah. So Narrator is very unique in this case because we are super different and our brain has always been on like doing something that people thought was impossible. Like whenever we demo Narrator, people think it's a magic show. They will like, they're like, what's the catch? What's going on? I'm going to try to break it. And we've leaned into that. We've leaned into the world that people have. So for all who don't know what Narrator is, I'll tell you what it does and you can tell me if it sounds magical or not.

Yeah.

Imagine an Excel sheet. Okay, so we're going to take all your data and we're going to put it into one Excel sheet. Not a million columns, just 11 columns. We're going to take all your data and put it into an 11-column Excel sheet. And in that one Excel sheet, any question you can come up with, we will answer using that one Excel sheet. And it will work whether your data is in any industry, in e-commerce, in banking, in crypto, education. In media, we have customers in all those sectors and it'll work when you have thousands and 100,000 rows of data or 100 billion rows of data. It still maintains that and you can answer any question and it doesn't get any ads and output for things. It gives you the data first, allows you to see example journeys, and then it's able to generate full analyses to help you make the best decision.

And so you've been out, you said doing lives. One of these about data is you mentioned that you've got narratives. If you're doing live demonstrations, what kind of narratives? Because what we haven't touched on is the different kinds of narratives that people might use the data. Because obviously there's a, there may be a logistics narrative. There may be a cash flow narrative. There may be, as you say, a CRM narrative. You want to just tell us what kind of narratives you're able to answer on stage and maybe give us a case study or something of how you've done that? Yeah.

So we do this all the time. I hop on stage. I ask the group of audience. or data people. And we use this also in our sales closing deck sometimes. And I say, ask me anything and I'll use my tool to answer any question you have. Give me questions that are hard.

What sort of question? Yeah. What sort of question would someone, you know, what sort of question would someone, you know, should I invest more in logistics support? What sort of questions are people asking?

Questions like that. So questions where people ask the questions like, okay, I have a chatbot. Like, does that help me get more sales? And they'll ask questions like, okay, are people actually, uh, who submit a ticket actually engaging with our FAQ site? And when people who engage with the FAQ site, are they more likely to actually complete the ticket? Questions like that are really, really open, uh, really hard questions that you could imagine. They're questions that are multiple systems, multiple sources of data.

Yeah.

That's usually how they try to stump you.

Yeah, I'm already thinking, oh, chatbot to support tickets to, you know, FAQs and community. That's a lot of different places where sometimes you're logged in, sometimes you're not.

Yeah.

Different devices. So yeah. So then you go on the stage, Ahmed, and you're saying you answer a question.

Yep. So I'll take the data and I'll show you how you can go from like your started session, which is the data tracked on your website, to someone who actually, let's say, buys, and then did they in between actually engage, submit a chat, or start a chat? And then the narrative that I always use is we have this really generic narrative. It's called, how does X impact Y? So it's like, okay, how does the engaging with the chatbot make your likelihood to order more? And then Narrative generates a full story that says like, it does work. It doesn't work. How has it been working over time? It might've worked in the past, but now it doesn't. It might have not, but now it does. And it explains to you and it quantifies it. It says, if you got 10% more people or 50% more people to engage with your chatbot, you can actually increase your conversion rate by another 10%. It actually gives you that detailed description and allows you to simulate that impact. So as an example question that we can do live and super confidently, and the benefit of having done this for years, like, is that I think till today, we also have like an internal bounty for For people that can find questions that we can't answer. So there's only been 2 questions that Narrator has not been able to answer, and both of them were found by our internal data team in Narrator. And it's been only 2, which has been years of running Narrator. So it's actually kind of fun to see how once people learn Narrator so deeply, they realize like how to like possibly break it. But if you're going that far and you've answered like probably a million questions at this point, it's fine. You can go try it and you can see the vastness.

Yeah.

And the best part about it, keep in mind that Narrator is standardized. That table is the same table for every company. And that enables such a unique world that people— so you asked me about how I get noticed. So one thing is that level of like, oh my God, I can't believe this. And people want to talk about it. 2, people get excited by what it will enable. So we say, why is this important? Why do we standardize all data? Like, who cares? Like, sounds awesome. Sounds like cool magic show, but why does it matter for the world? And then people realize that, wait, wait, wait, this is the first time ever I can share analyses and even dashboards and anything across companies. That means that because everything, the underlying structure is the same, I can do an analysis on LTV and share it. I can open source my work for the first time ever. That means instead of you having to go to a consultant to get an LTV analysis, every day you probably have like 30 of them in the Narrator store. That are rated, that are optioned, that you can read. And we're just, we haven't launched a store yet, but we do have templates available for you to use, LTV, CAC, and all these common ones. And by experts that will run on your data and not just give you the answer, but explain to you in English how to think about these situations.

Right.

You can switch from company A to company— oh, sorry, go ahead.

No, no. So that's wonderful. So you've mentioned about doing live and, you know, my shows, you've kindly come on as well to explain a little bit about data and about data transparency and this great term about the definitions game. Ahmed El-Samadisi, CEO of Narrator. You know, we only have 20 minutes. We've already run over a little bit, but if you want to find out more about you and data and how you help to find true answers, where can they find you?

I'm very active on LinkedIn. So follow me on LinkedIn. That's usually a good place where I share a lot of like information about data and check out our website, of course. And if you ever want to email me directly, feel free to email me. I'm just ahmed@narrator.ai.

Ahmed, thank you so much for joining me today on the Unnoticed Entrepreneur Show and illustrating a whole area of running a business that is well out of my purview. So thank you so much for sharing your insights.

Thank you, Jim, for having me. I really love this conversation.

Yeah, well, me too. I've learned so much and I'm sure that my fellow Unnoticed Entrepreneurs have too. So thank you for joining us. And for those of you listening, thank you once again for joining me on the show. If you like this, do please rate it, review it, and share it with a fellow entrepreneur and let you know that your comments and reviews really do help me to get more great guests like Ahmed to come on the show. Thank you for listening. And until we meet again, either invest in your data or do like I do and, and maybe just use your intuition.