Studio71 uses Redash to build a data driven culture

About Studio71

A media company and content studio, Studio71 works with artists, actors and YouTubers (like Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Rhett and Link, etc) to develop, produce and distribute content on various channels. Studio71 is a Red Arrow Studios Company headquartered in Los Angeles with offices in Berlin, New York, Toronto, London, Paris and Milan.

For six years, Mike has worked as CTO at Studio71 where they’ve been using Redash since 2016. We’ve asked Mike to share his story about how he has transformed Studio71 into a more data-driven company.

The challenge

Tracking, managing and querying various data sources from different databases makes for a challenging and time-consuming task. Before using Redash, the tech team spent a lot of resources getting their data in hand, visualizing and creating custom interfaces for reporting. It took several days of development time to create those reports and things didn’t move as quickly as they wanted.

A critical function of the Studio71 Tech team is to track content metrics across all of the different social and distribution platforms. Every system is different and staying on top of it is a big important job that is only getting bigger and more important every day.

The solution

Mike wanted a solution that allowed the company to work closer with their data. This led them to using Redash.

I think the number one thing that drew my eye was the flexibility. We had data coming in from Google Analytics, Elasticsearch. We still have multiple SQL databases. We've got some NoSQL databases banging around. So we've got a lot of different data sources.

When I came across Redash, I found that list of supported data sources and supports and it covered a lot of ground for us. So that was obviously a huge positive development when I saw that.

Mike receives a lot of questions from other executives, board members and their parent company. “How much does this cost?” and “What data are we pulling and how frequently?” just marked the start of it. Redash proved to be the right place to get all their data together and respond to those questions swiftly:

I automated a lot of the backlog of requests within an hour or two, by simply sitting down at Redash, writing queries, and playing with visualizations.

The outcome

Using Redash to bring data closer

Redash has become a huge time saver for Studio71. They can write queries, visualize their data, and embed visualizations to reports. This saves the tech team a lot of time as they don't need to build custom solutions.

If the developers launch a new feature that spark questions from other teams, I can write a query and put it in a dashboard or report in the same meeting. I've got some great graphs up rotating on a screen in my office that I look at every day. That was a big change for us and improved monitoring of all these stat collections and video processing systems we have.

Using Redash to save time and track more

It used to entail a complicated process which required them to make a dev ticket and have it work through the process. Now very simply, they just write a single query and and share the link to the visualization.

The time saving aspect is a huge win. We have a lot lot of data sources and a lot of different teams in our company that all have very different requirements for data.

Making sure we track even the most trivial thing and monitor it with a query in Redash became a standard that helps the business in various ways.

Even if it's a new webpage, that's less about database entries. We can still add the Google Analytics into Redash and instead of giving everyone analytics access all the time, we could have them go to Redash and see the report. So that's been probably the second biggest thing, the completeness of our ability to track success metrics.

Using Redash to support sales

Sales and the talent management teams consume the most data.

Everything comes back to sales and a lot of our data is either tracking those sales or finding new ways to market our talent and content.

Redash supports sales with critical business data, like which of their influencers would make sense for different brands.

Tracking and visualizing success metrics are essential and something we use Redash for all the time. Requests like "Can I see a report of our branded videos that have done better than we projected?” are very easy to create, which is great for my team, and it helps Sales get what they need ASAP.