Instamojo on data stack philosophy

Ankur Sharma, Head of Analytics at Instamojo, discusses the company's data stack, emphasizing its three main components: Fivetran for data extraction, Amazon Redshift for data warehousing, and dashboards built on Redshift for business intelligence, including tools like Klipfolio and Mixpanel for product analytics and behavioral analysis. He highlights the shift from ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) to ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), which simplifies the process by allowing raw data to be loaded into the warehouse before transformation, empowering analysts with more control. Instamojo's data stack philosophy revolves around maintaining a lean team and utilizing off-the-shelf tools to avoid unnecessary resource expenditure, ensuring agility and scalability as the company grows. Sharma advocates for end-to-end ownership of the data stack within the analytics team to reduce dependencies and enable faster decision-making. Looking ahead, he anticipates integrating emerging APIs, particularly in FinTech, and advises startups to avoid building in-house data stacks unless data is their core product, as off-the-shelf solutions can be more efficient and scalable.