In spring and summer 2025, Riverboat Consulting partnered with a Series A startup in the special education space. The client was pivoting its business model from service to SaaS, but all its legacy reporting was geared towards the service model. At this pivotal moment, they did not have any analytics team members on staff, so we engaged to fill in that gap.
What We Built
Service to SaaS Transition
Most of the client’s reporting relied on data in the Postgres application database that was unstructured or semi-structured. While a few of the business stakeholders knew SQL, the unpacking, filters, and joins necessary to turn the application data into reporting-friendly tables was too complex.
We developed the standard queries to clean the data into a usable format, where stakeholders could extend further on their own. The business had enough on their plate with the pivot, so this simplified one aspect of it.
Mode to Hex Migration
The company had been a longtime user of Mode Analytics for dashboarding and notebook analysis, but thought that Hex offered a more modern version of Mode’s features for a significant savings, and was ahead of the curve with AI features. BI tool migrations can be a hassle, so it was great that the client narrowed their focus to only migrating the most important dashboards.
This enabled us to hit the ground running, and continuously get feedback from key business stakeholders to confirm we were on the right track and that Hex would pass user acceptance testing. The engineering and data science teams were very Python-heavy and were able to seamlessly transition between Python and SQL in Hex notebooks.
Custom ETL Pipelines
While most of the client’s data from its Postgres application database and PostHog product analytics tool could cleanly ingest into BigQuery using Airbyte, they used a smaller product analytics tool that did not have a connector on any of the main ETL players.
We aligned with the product analytics tool company on how to extract the data we’d need from their public API endpoints and then created a custom Airbyte connector that got the data into BigQuery in the shape the client needed.
Outcomes
As we tightened up the Hex migration, we trained up a business stakeholder who knew SQL on how to edit and maintain the Hex dashboards. From there, it was a very smooth handoff.
During our engagement, we filled in three very big gaps for the client at a time in which they didn’t have anyone in-house who could take on these responsibilities. Have any projects that you feel you need some extra help on? Get in touch.