This podcast interview focuses on product innovation that has the power to provide us a significant competitive advantage by leveraging unstructured data. My guest is Kirk Marple, CEO of Unstruk Data.

Kirk Marple is a customer-focused technology leader. He has over 25 years of experience developing media management pipelines, leading DevOps at venture-backed companies, and structuring successful exits. He holds multiple patents and industry awards and has truly established himself as an industry leader.

Today, he's the CEO of Unstruk Data, a company that's on a mission empowering enterprises to transform unstructured data files into actionable intelligence about real-world assets to solve massive business, environmental and societal problems.

And this inspired me, and hence I invited Kirk to my podcast. We explore what's broken in the data analytics market - and in particular, unstructured data. Kirk shares his journey of how he pivoted from building a podcast discovery tool to a data platform for real-world assets. He shares his big lessons learned about coming to market too early and how postponing the launch has been a valuable decision that made the company more recession-proof. Lastly, he shares his experience on what it takes to build a software business that's got staying power.

Here is one of his quotes:

"I think the volume of data is probably one of the big stopping points. Oil and gas companies probably spend millions of dollars to search the undersea floor of their oil pipelines. And now the data just sits in a bucket somewhere after they capture it, and they can't go back and find it, or reuse that data…"

During this interview, you will learn four things:

1. Why the real user value with SaaS solutions virtually always happens in the last mile 2. That the thing that keeps founders awake at night is not the worry about having a compelling solution but how to attract companies that need it. 3. Why messaging is often the hardest thing - not the technology. 4. Why having an open platform can cause serious problems in sales

For more information about the guest from this week:

Kirk Marple • Website: Unstruk Data