How Radical Visibility Can Grow Your Business
Nov 4, 2025
In this article, we’ll dive deeper into one of the core benefits of building proper data infrastructure and why it matters more than most founders realize – what I like to call “radical visibility”.
Radical Visibility: The Foundation of Smart Growth
Radical visibility is knowing exactly what's happening in your business. Without understanding the “what”, it’s impossible to:
Determine where to invest your time and resources for the best return
Measure the impact from those investments
Your data is the key to achieving radical visibility because it provides an objective look into what’s happening behind the scenes.
You may feel like you have a good pulse on your business, but gut-feel only gets you so far. Without objective measures, it’s hard to pinpoint what’s working, what’s not working, and the potential impact various changes will have on your business.
As the saying goes, you can’t improve what you don’t measure.
The Gap Between Data & Understanding
Most early-stage startups we work with are drowning in data but starving for insights.
They have Stripe for payments, product data generated by their software application, CRM data from Hubspot, Segment for events, and random data in Google Sheets to fill in the gaps.
The data exists. But it's scattered across tools, updated manually (when someone remembers), and telling different stories depending on which platform you check.
Just having data doesn’t mean it’s accessible or useful to you.
Does it take you two weeks to determine which customer segments were most responsive to your latest marketing campaign? Do you spend entire meetings debating what the “real” acquisition and retention numbers are instead of discussing what to do about them?
That’s not radical visibility.
What Radical Visibility Actually Looks Like
When we achieve radical visibility for a startup, four things happen:
1. Single Source of Truth: All your data flows into one place. Not copied and pasted - automatically synced. When someone asks "what's our conversion rate", there's one answer, in one dashboard, that everyone trusts.
2. Metrics That Matter: Instead of tracking everything, we identify the 5-10 metrics that actually predict success for your specific business. That way, with the massive amount of data you have, your time is only spent on what truly moves the needle.
3. Context, Not Just Numbers: Raw metrics without context are dangerous. Radical visibility means understanding that your conversion dropped not just by how much, but segmented by source, correlated with product changes, and compared to seasonal patterns.
4. Answers in Minutes, Not Days: Time is not a commodity in business. You need to identify the drivers of significant drops in feature usage during a launch, not days after.
Radical visibility is really about distilling your data down into the most meaningful and actionable insights, delivered to the right people, at the right time.
The Two Pillars of Visibility: Growth & Efficiency
We focus on understanding two fundamental aspects of your business:
Growth Metrics show where you're headed:
New customer acquisition trends
Revenue expansion patterns
Product adoption rates
Efficiency Metrics show how well you're executing:
Lead to customer conversion rate
Revenue per employee
CAC payback period
The magic happens when you connect these two. Growth without efficiency leads to unsustainable burn. Efficiency without growth leads to a lifestyle business. You need both to paint the full picture of business performance and identify the bottlenecks preventing you from scaling.
If your fastest-growing acquisition channel has the worst unit economics, you’re paying to grow unprofitably. And if your top paying customers require 10x more resources than any other segment, are they really your highest-value customers or are they limiting your ability to scale?
The Compounding Effect of Visibility
Here’s what founders don't expect: radical visibility compounds.
Month 1: You spot obvious problems and quick wins. Response time is killing conversion. Your best sales rep has techniques others don't. Simple fixes, immediate impact.
Month 3: You start seeing patterns. Certain customer segments churn predictably. Feature adoption correlates with retention. You make proactive changes instead of reactive fixes.
Month 6: Your entire team operates differently. Product knows which features drive revenue. Sales knows which leads to prioritize. Marketing knows which channels actually work. Everyone rows in the same direction.
As you answer questions about your business with data, you identify better questions to ask. It’s like peeling back the layers of an onion - every question you answer uncovers new opportunities to improve your business.
Common Visibility Mistakes to Avoid
Measuring Everything: More dashboards don't mean more visibility. Focusing on everything means focusing on nothing. Start with 5-10 core metrics and expand only when you have specific questions to answer.
Perfect Over Practical: I've seen companies spend months planning the perfect data infrastructure while flying blind. Ship quickly and iterate (as long as you’re not doing anything irreversible or risky).
Tools Over Process: A Tableau or Looker license won't give you radical visibility any more than buying a gym membership will make you fit. It's about the discipline of maintaining clean data and regular reviews.
Ignoring the Human Element: Data doesn't make decisions, people do. Radical visibility includes training your team to interpret and act on data, not just look at it.
Looking Ahead
Radical visibility is crucial to your business’s growth. Once you can see what’s happening in your business, you can start making informed decisions about where to invest your resources.
The question isn't whether you need better visibility. It's how much longer you can afford to operate without it.
Thanks for reading!
