Building Analyse: What I Learned from My First Acquisition

Analyse started as a weekend project. I wanted a better way to understand data without the overhead of enterprise tooling. What ended up happening was two years of late nights, a small team, and eventually, an acquisition.

The Beginning

It was 2021. I had a simple idea: make data analysis accessible without requiring a data science background. Most tools on the market assumed you either had engineers to write queries or money to pay for consultants.

I built the first version in a few weeks. Rough around the edges, but functional. I posted it to a few communities and got more traction than I expected.

What Actually Mattered

The thing nobody tells you about building a product is that the first 20% is the fun part. You're in the zone, shipping features, watching the user count tick up. It's the other 80% — support tickets, edge cases, churn conversations — that determines whether you actually have a business.

A few things I got right:

Talk to your users constantly. Not surveys. Actual conversations. I did a call a week with power users for the first year. It was time-consuming but I avoided building things nobody wanted.

Charge early. I was scared to put up a paywall. Turns out people who pay are also people who care. Paid users gave 10x the feedback of free users.

Pick boring infrastructure. I spent a week evaluating exotic databases and ended up on Postgres. Still on Postgres. No regrets.

The Acquisition

The acquirer came through a connection. They weren't looking for Analyse specifically — they were looking for the team and the customer base. That's usually how it goes.

The process took about four months from first conversation to close. Longer than I expected, with more lawyers than I expected.

The thing I'd tell myself if I could go back: the outcome is less about luck and more about whether you've built something real. We had real users, real revenue, and a real codebase. That made the conversation easy.

What I Carry Forward

Every company I've built since has had Analyse's DNA in it somewhere. The instinct to ship something small and learn. The habit of talking to users. The patience to sit with a boring stack that works.

The acquisition wasn't the point. Building something people actually used was.