Practitioner pattern · Taylor Wells (Disney+)
Buy analytics tools first, but set dates to decide whether to switch
Guest says companies without checkpoints get stuck with rising vendor costs; no numbers
Unknownanalytics-attributionteam-process
What they did
Use off-the-shelf or open-source tools early unless there is a real chance of sudden massive scale. Agree up front on review points: if moderately successful, review within 3 months whether to cut events or offset cost; if wildly successful, review within 1 month how fast to deploy an in-house system, then run both for about a month to compare metrics before switching off the old one. Get leadership to accept that reports won't match year over year after a switch (the GA360-to-GA4 move stalled for years over this).
What happened
Guest's view from several large companies: those that buy without planned checkpoints end up absorbing vendor costs; those with them can switch easily.
In their words
Sub Club by RevenueCat · Building an Effective Data Product Strategy — Taylor Wells, News Corp“I would generally lean towards use off-the-shelf, use open source, things like that early on if you're not expecting immediate massive scale”
“Or you could say, "If we're wildly successful, we need to evaluate within a month how quickly we can start to deploy an internal solution that can offset that, how much of an overlap time that we need of like a month for comparison of the metrics”
Related topics
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More from this episode
- Disney+: Build your own event tracking, keep Adobe as a backup, then drop Adobe~$1K/day in-house vs ~$33K/day for Adobe; Adobe removed within weeks
- Disney+: Log one generic 'button clicked' event with keys, not a new event per featureGuest says it avoided costly renames and merges; still in use years later
- Disney+: Email the boss three bullet points by noon each day instead of dashboardsThe president stopped needing dashboards; no numbers
- Disney+: Move a show with near-100% completion up from the last row of the home screen
- Disney+: Group viewers by household, like parents or single adults, not by fan typeHousehold groups predicted behavior better; over half the audience were single adults
- RevenueCat: Start on Amplitude; add a data pipeline once product changes break your definitionsCo-host says it smoothed definition changes for data users; no numbers
- Dump app event logs into a plain SQL database instead of buying analyticsToo hard to explore, so nobody asked questions; moved back to Mixpanel