Consulting

I am an independent data-strategy consultant and a hobbyist-researcher in network-science, living space design and online communities. My background by education is in computer science. I attended the Computer Science & Engineering undergraduate program of India’s top computer-science university-- Indian Institute of Technology.

Email: vinaydebrou@gmail.com.

Now (last updated: Jan 2021)

  • I'm creating an interactive network-map for Yak Collective -- an onine-network of independent consultants/creators/freelancers, to enable new inter-disciplinary collaborations. Learn more in this scope-and- roadmap document

  • I'm working on facilitating a learning-club on 'Interdisciplinary Teams to Solve Complex Problems' on the Hyperlink Academy platform. If you'd like to co-facilitate/participate, drop me an email.

  • I'm accepting new client-engagments with founding teams and management executives who need external help with untangling their data strategy(refactoring their decision-making frameworks/tools) and customer-experience strategy (disovering high-consequence blind spots). Ping me.

What do I do

I usually work with web-based businesses but there are exceptions. Past clients include early-stage SaaS startups, academic researchers, e-commerce companies and independent creators. In my consulting, I offer a specific combination of reviewing both the data-strategy & the customer-experience strategy, to asssist clients in need of external help to tune the product-market fit of their business.

My consulting practice can involve: reviewing/architecting data-systems for analytics, reviewing customer-experience strategy and assisting the product-development team. More importantly, it involves sensemaking sessions with the management to connect the dots to discover blind-spots in their customer-experience strategy.

What have I worked on

  • CX Strategy: Reviewing customer-journey for online consumer-businesses to discover blind-spots in their customer-experience strategy and offering specific recommendations to refactor. Example: review & reconfiguring the customer-experience strategy of an emerging mountainbike-lighting brand to remove 'conversion-blockers' from the existing customer-journey map.

  • Data-Strategy: Creating interactive visualizations of critical data to provide the big-picture for decision-making and offer recommendations on where-to-look. Example: an interactive network-map for an online network of independent consultant/creators to generate new collaborations and enable self-assembly of teams for collaborative projects.

  • Data Systems: Architecting digital system-of-record using low-code/ no-code tools. Examples: a content production system and an inventory-management database.

Selected Projects from my past client work:

  • Data Systems: Data-collection, analysis & geo-mapping of data about marriage celebrants from Australian government registry-- to assist a policy-research project. More details here.

  • Data Systems: Preparation, analysis & visualization of customer research data for a senior executive at a big bank in Monaco. More details here.

  • CX Strategy: Review of the customer-interaction experience for a growing bike-lighting brand resulting in refactoring of the customer-journey map via changes in website design, copy and customer-communication process. Website here.

  • CX Strategy: Web-CX review for a subscription box company that curates artisan home-decor. Website here.

  • Service Design: Architecting an internal content production system for a fintech SaaS startup using Coda (a no-code developer tool). Check out the system prototype here.

  • CX Strategy: CX strategy of a mood-based webspace for an upcoming e-commerce business. Checkout the beta output here.

  • CX Strategy: Review & refactoring of the website customer-experience for the 'Community Fundraising' section of Krispy Kreme Doughnuts(Australia Division) business website. Website section here

  • CX Strategy: Web-CX strategy review and production of website copy (the english version) for Interlink FBC: a Texas-based franchise brokerage for immigrant investors. Website here.

Selected Projects where I was a contributor:

  • Participated in a collaborative customer-discovery(future-applications) project for a leading neurotech-device startup. My contribution was on identifying and contextualizing the potential applications of neuroscience-as-a-service in future workspaces.

  • Data Collection and Preparation-for-Analysis for a Twitter idea-crowdsourcing experiment run by James Cattell (part of the Systems Unit in the UK Cabinet Office) on UK government's pandemic recovery plan. More details on the project here.

  • Strategy Report for post-pandemic business intelligence by the Yak Collective-- Don’t Waste the Reboot. My contribution was Slides 37-38: Restructure as a Small-World Network. Project publicly available here.

  • Policy research project for Government of India’s official policy think tank (Niti Aayog) -- Surveying & Modeling Industry-Community collaboration models for rural development for India, from around the world. Analysis & Strategy Document available here.

  • Research Project to model a Living Heritage Business Ecosystem with community-led heritage tourism, under the guidance of Ioannis Poulios. Partial Draft available here.

Selected side-projects/things I did for fun:

  • Helped my university roommate with early-stage customer-acquisition for his custom drone-building startup TechEagle. The startup was later acquired by Zomato(India's hyperlocal food delivery unicorn).

  • Tweetribe: a curation of interesting people on Twitter to make the most out of Twitter experience. beta Website here.

  • Conversion Sherpa: Reviewing landing pages for the first-time web-entrepreneurs and associated subreddit with 1200+ subscribers. beta Website & Subreddit here.

  • LIFA Library(work in progress): a curated library of resources for location-independent free-agents like me. Webpage here.

  • Playing with Data: Exploring YouTube Trending Videos data (2017-18). Notebook here.

  • Internet 4 All Challenge (2014) by Telenor: National Finalist for modeling an alerting system for road-accidents that connects nearby hospitals and the victim's family to the incident.

  • Trading Alpha Building: Bronze Winner (among top 150 global participants) in the global alpha-building (quant models) competition by WorldQuant.

Thanks for reading. Feel free to reach out for a chat.