Product

Guide to getting started for non-engineers

Velvet is a technical product that maps to your unique data model. That said - we’ve designed an accessible experience for every member of the team.

A search engine for your data

In most cases, non-engineers have limited access to data. Your product, growth, and customer data lives across various database tables, third party tools, and events. This isn’t because your engineers are hiding away secrets - it’s just difficult and time consuming to set up data infrastructure in an accessible way. With Velvet, you can make informed decisions with all of your data in one place.

Read more: Velvet for product owners.

View data from your 3rd-party tools

As a startup, you likely leverage third-party tools for infrastructure, payments, or marketing. These platforms optimize your team’s time and let you focus on your core business. They also hold a ton of data about your customers. Velvet gives you insight into every event.

Just a few examples of the data points living inside these third-party tools:

  • Stripe - Find out when your customers view your pricing page, pay, or churn
  • Segment - Send us every single event your track in your product
  • Mixpanel - Include product analytics context like funnel or daily active users
  • Customer.io - Data on every email or push notification you send

View data in your database

Your database holds vital information about your customers - like their email, phone number, session timestamps, trial status, and subscription payments. Unless you have direct access to your database tables, you likely have limited access to your system’s most important information. Velvet provides an accessible interface so you can see the data inside of every connected table.

View your product event data

With enough users, you’ll want to analyze data on every part of your product experience - from onboarding, to paywall, to feature engagement. Once an event is set up with Velvet, you’ll be able to search it alongside your other system data. Ask questions like - “Show me all paying users who watched a video yesterday”.

You'll get a data table for each source that can be queried, filtered, and used.

Ask questions, get results

Ask natural language questions

Normally, you’d need to write SQL to unify your data across various sources. With Velvet, we’ve built an AI interface so you can use natural language to automate SQL and return results directly. Kind of like ChatGPT, but on top of your own data sets.

Return results from your data

When you ask your data a question, we introspect on your data to return useful results. You may have to do a bit of experimentation to get to your desired result (since we’re working with your actual real-time data).

There are two types of results you can experiment with:

  • Data tables: Return a list that matches your criteria. For example - a list of new paying subscribers, or a list of most popular articles from this week.
  • Data analysis: Quantify something in your data. For example - how many monthly active users you had this month, or the number of new signups last week.

Ask questions that return lists or analytics results.

Take control of your data stack

Manage building blocks for the whole team

You’re probably used to defining a data question or feature, creating a ticket, prioritizing it against all the other work that needs to get done, and then waiting weeks if not months for it to get done. With Velvet, you have far more autonomy over your product system. You’ll learn how to view, manage, and define data directly - to ship better features, faster.

Use Velvet to reduce costs and build faster:

  • Save queries: Bookmark finalized results you want to track over time.
  • Visualize data: Create charts and graphs on top of your queries using AI.
  • Set notifications: Send changes in your query results, or get a status report.
  • Create and reuse: Define shared queries that your entire team can use.
  • Real-time data features: Save queries that can be used directly in your product.
  • API endpoints: Turn saved queries into API endpoints for engineers to use.

Email us any time at team@usevelvet.com, or schedule a call here.

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