Your First Data Strategy Should Fit on a Napkin

Vol. 22: How to prioritize decisions and metrics before infrastructure

Welcome back to The Datapreneur — the newsletter where we strip away the corporate theater, get real about what works, and build data systems that actually drive decisions.

This week, let’s talk about something every startup gets wrong from day one:
the belief that a real data strategy needs tools, pipelines, and dashboards.

It doesn’t.

What it needs is clarity.
And clarity, at the beginning, fits on a napkin.

TL;DR

Your first data strategy isn’t a stack.
It’s a list of decisions.

Before you invest in infrastructure, ask three questions:
→ What decisions drive the business every week or month?
→ What metrics support those decisions?
→ Where will those metrics live — visibly and consistently?

Answer that, and you’ve got a data strategy.
Everything else is just noise.

The illusion of “building data early”

Every startup says the same thing:

“We already have the data — it’s in Ads Manager.”

Sure. Until someone asks to see it.

They never export it.
Never store it properly.
Because, honestly — why would we?
It’s all there in the tool, right?

Until it isn’t.

The day they want to do a retrospective analysis — a look back at what actually worked — they realize the data is scattered, inconsistent, or gone.

They’ve been testing, experimenting, iterating... but never saving.
And you can’t become data-driven when your data disappears every time you switch tabs.

Six months later, ten tools in, no one knows where the truth lives — or whether the numbers mean anything at all.

Then comes the black day: when they finally want to build a report…
and discover they have nothing to build it with.
Worse — nothing worth reporting in the first place.

That’s when the word “strategy” finally enters the chat.
But by then, it’s usually too late to start one the hard way.

But first, the napkin test

If your data strategy can’t fit on a napkin, it’s probably overcomplicated.

Grab a Sharpie. Draw three columns:

1️⃣ Decisions you make regularly
(e.g., which channels to scale, which features to ship, which clients to prioritize)

2️⃣ Metrics that inform those decisions
(one per decision — CAC, LTV, churn, engagement, whatever matters)

3️⃣ Where those numbers live — and how you calculate them
(It could be Notion, Sheets, Airtable — anything, as long as it’s shared and trusted.)

That’s it.
That’s your first data strategy.

You don’t need a warehouse yet.
You need visibility and ownership.

Because strategy isn’t about collecting — it’s about aligning.
And once you’re aligned, then you can think about a warehouse.

Prioritize where money moves

When everything feels important, measure what’s expensive.

Start with the decisions tied to:
→ Revenue (where it comes from and leaks),
→ Retention (what keeps it flowing),
→ Runway (what burns it).

Everything else can wait.

You’ll be tempted to track everything. Don’t.
Early-stage clarity comes from ruthless focus, not completeness.

The napkin vs. the enterprise deck

Enterprises love data decks.

They hold workshops, design beautiful slide templates, and write things like “Data Vision 2025.”

‘Cause this is what works when you need to align 1000+ people.

Because the more complex the company, the easier it is to confuse documentation with direction.
They mistake a strategy for the artifact that describes it — not the behavior it’s supposed to create.

And I mean, they can afford it.

Startups don’t have that luxury.
You can’t hide behind frameworks when every decision changes runway.

At the early stage, the best data strategy is brutally short:
“What do we need to know to survive the next quarter — and how do we track it?”

That’s it.
No pillars. No vision statements. No maturity models.

A napkin wins because it forces you to prioritize.
It cuts out the noise and keeps the conversation alive.
Instead of saying “let’s build a data culture,” you’re saying:

“Every Monday, we look at CAC, LTV, and churn. If they move, we know why.”

That’s not a slogan. That’s culture.
And culture is the only data strategy that actually scales.

When to scale beyond the napkin

You’ll know you’re ready to “go beyond” when:

• Your napkin stops fitting the decisions you make.

• You’re repeating the same data cleaning every week.

• You need real-time, not retrospective.

• You spend 20 hours a week just preparing basic reports.

That’s the point to bring in infrastructure — not before.

And if you need help translating that napkin into a stable, automated foundation?
That’s where teams like Valiotti Analytics come in.

Our Marketing Analytics in 90 Days program helps founders go from scattered spreadsheets to a clean, unified measurement system — without hiring full-time roles or drowning in tools.

Why it matters

Because in the beginning, every data decision is a trust decision.

When your numbers are scattered, nobody knows which version to believe — so every meeting becomes a debate about definitions instead of actions.
You burn hours reconciling dashboards instead of improving them.

A napkin-sized strategy eliminates that.
It replaces “what’s true?” with “what matters?”

That shift — from truth-seeking to decision-making — is where real growth starts.

Once the team sees how data helps them win faster, they start demanding better data.
That’s how adoption happens.
That’s how you go from gut-driven to data-informed without losing speed.

And here’s the paradox:
The companies that start small with data usually end up building the most powerful systems later.
Because they build them out of necessity, not vanity.

They don’t need dashboards to look smart — they need them to survive.

And when survival drives your analytics, clarity isn’t optional. It’s oxygen.

The takeaway

Your first data strategy shouldn’t look impressive.
It should look obvious.

You can build it with a napkin and a pen.
List your key decisions. Link them to metrics. Make those metrics visible.

That’s it. That’s strategy.

When the napkin starts looking like a mural — that’s when you scale infrastructure.
Not sooner.

Weekly Roundup

Every week, I highlight a few posts that challenge how we think about whatever’s the topic — here’s what caught my eye this time:

1. “A healthy data strategy is like a tree — quietly stable, deeply grounded”
[Read the full post →]

Everyone loves shiny dashboards and tool stacks.
But Sebastian [always] reminds us: tools are just the branches.
The real strategy lives underground — in the roots.

Clear problems to solve.
Outcomes tied to real business value.
Governance that prevents root rot without killing growth.

If your strategy is just a list of logos, this one will hit home.

2. “Let’s make Fridays about checking Data Product performance”
[Read the full post →]

Darren drops a brilliant, practical ritual: weekly data product audits.

Who’s using them?
Are they solving problems?
Do people trust them?

Because building dashboards isn’t the goal — adoption is.
It’s a reminder that data teams need to use data on their own work, not just on others’.

3. “If your Head of Data’s first move is to ask for a $1M platform budget, you didn’t hire a business partner. You hired a salesperson”
[Read the full post →]

Ali’s post is a masterclass in sequencing.

He breaks down how one pharma org stopped chasing “modernization” and started with a single use case that proved value.
From there, they built trust, credibility, and then a platform — one win at a time.

It’s a perfect blueprint for founders who want to grow data maturity without wasting millions.

That’s it for this week

If your company’s collecting everything but deciding nothing — maybe it’s time to grab a napkin instead of another dashboard.

Until next time —
Nick from Valiotti Analytics