The hardest part of building a company is going from point A to point B in an organized manner. There is, honestly, no guidebook or map for doing so. Moreover, building a company is supremely overwhelming, it takes everything you have got to build a business from scratch.
This has a serious downside: you seldom get enough time to look up, think, and make course corrections while working so hard. As a result, most companies fail to find a better way of doing things than the one they are already doing things or build a culture that works better than the one they have already got.
But how do you solve this problem? The answer, it seems, lies in data and a culture of continuous learning.
You simply can’t overstate the importance of data for any business. You need to look at the data your company generates and also the changes that are happening in the market and find a way to address the gap. At the same time, working culture at a company also generates hundreds and thousands of data points that can direct to a better way of working or solving a problem.
While data is incredibly important, you have to continuously experiment and learn from those experiments as well. In an interview with Future Startup, Dnet co-founder and CEO, Dr. Ananya Raihan illustrates how Dnet apply data-driven decisions and continuous learning as the building block of building an innovation culture:
“Our works, you see, are mostly data-driven. We analyze the ongoing trend in a particular industry/sector and we pick signals to launch a new service or product. For example, we have identified that mental wellbeing is a very important emerging issue and now conducting structured experiments which will result in identifying our next product or service. Application of AI in services designed for poor is also an area we are engaged in. I would say, R&D is in the DNA of Dnet and that’s probably the secret.”
We live in a very fast-paced world. Things change overnight and the only sustainable way to stay relevant is through relentless learning and experiments.
“Trends, for example, used to have a cycle of 5-8 years before, but now they change within 2 to 2.5 years. Changes happen way faster in today’s world. So, if we don’t do or explore something new, we would soon be obsolete–both individually and organizationally. You get to evolve in order to stay relevant.
If you ask me about one specific suggestion to new social entrepreneurs, it will be: do not assume you know what your target audience wants. Engage them and learn from them if you are serious in making a meaningful change.”
The most sure fire way of going from point A to point B in a business is building something people want and then working hard to reach out to those people. Relying on data, relentless learning and tweaking is the most effective way of doing so.
