James Rubinstein on benn.substack

I thought a little more about your gas station analogy over the weekend (I lead an exciting life, what can i say!). Here's where it falls down: most gas stations make basically $0 on gas sales. Also, gas is a commodity, so there's little differentiation in quality or price between stations. So what a gas station actually does is provide a captive audience for selling snacks. The better you are at optimizing that, the more money your station will make. Therefore, analytics would actually be quite useful in understanding what gets people from the pump into the store (to wit: Buckee's as a "destination"). Maybe i'm just hopelessly optimistic about how data can be transformative. But then again, I would be, wouldn't I?! I think the first mover in the space to understand the value of data is going to be the one that captures the market. You can have a good product without "data" and a bad product with data, you have to have the culture to build the flywheel, but the flywheel goes: good data->good product insights -> better product -> better data -> better product insights -> better product