Why Every Startup Marketer Needs to Learn SQL

About four weeks back, I learned SQL, and it’s been one of the greatest skills I could have ever acquired as a marketing / business guy at a startup. Since learning SQL, our marketing team has:

• Determined the interests which are most highly correlated with our user base –> allowing us to create super high-value target groups for our Facebook ads.
• Determined the courses which are most highly correlated with those target groups (so that we know which courses to advertise).
• Compiled a set of rockstar vanity metrics that showcase the size and awesomeness of Udemy –> Did you know that students have enrolled in more than 143,907 courses on Udemy?
• Determined the demographic differences between our Facebook & AdWords ad signups (to better explain why our Facebook ad signups have an LTV that’s 4-5x those of our Adwords signups).
• Analyzed the future enrollment rates of our users based on which course they enrolled in first –> confirming our hypothesis that users who enrolled in a crappy first course were far less likely (about 70% less) to go on to enroll in another course on Udemy (ever!). This drove us to create much stronger quality controls on Udemy.
• Determined the % of Udemy signups that enroll in a course on their 1st day (let’s look at a graph of this one since graphs are fun):

• And a whole lot more really cool stuff.

*** Learn the basics with this FREE SQL tutorial for beginners on Udemy. ***

If you don’t know, SQL is a database language designed to enable you to query, manipulate, and communicate with your database. And if you’re like most internet startups out there, your databases are built in MySQL, an open source database used by almost every internet company (people using NoSQL… we’ll have to talk another time). Within your databases there are then a series of “tables” which store various parts of your data… some store user information, some store user behaviors or actions, some store your content, etc, etc. So now when our marketing team has a hypothesis or wants to look into something, we can query those tables and look into it ourselves. This has been huge for us and I’ve found that there are two massive benefits to having a marketing team that knows SQL.

#1 – Learning SQL has literally DOUBLED or TRIPLED the speed at which our marketing team can learn & execute. There’s no more waiting on a dev (who’s busy with far more important tasks of making our product awesome). If we want to run analysis, we just do it… as in right now, today. Speed is everything. Monstrous win.

#2 – We don’t just learn faster. We learn cooler, more interesting shit. This is a tough thing to fully understand if you’ve never had your hands on the data, but there’s a type of learning which you quite honestly just can’t get to unless you are really knee deep in the muck, iterating, and figuring things out. Our marketing team is now knee deep in the muck. Another huge win. This has been really big and I now feel so strongly about it that every single person that comes on to our marketing team in the future will learn SQL. Here’s how we did it.

How We Learned SQL:

Now before I get too far into this, I need to give some heavy credit to one of the ballers on our marketing team, Archie Abrams, for making this happen. Archie’s the type of guy who just learns. He doesn’t think twice about it. Need to get something done. Need to learn a new skill to do it. No worries. Learn the skill. Do it. This is basically his attitude – pretty straightforward.

So the other week when we decided we had a whole bunch of analysis we wanted to run on our users (and that it probably wasn’t going to get done any time soon b/c our devs were crazy busy), he decided to learn SQL and just do it himself.

He got with our CEO, Eren Bali (technical background) and scheduled a four-hour session on a Saturday to learn our tables and the basics of the syntax. He had written a few queries before, but nothing crazy.

Lucky for me, I happened to be in the office at the same time. I figured I’d just sit in on the meeting, maybe work on some other stuff and just soak it in, but within about 5 minutes that gameplan changed completely as I realized 1) this stuff was insanely powerful and 2) writing these queries was no walk in the park, so I’d better pay attention.

Four hours later, Eren had taught us our tables and the basics of the syntax and writing queries. His teaching style was classic startup… something like – “Let’s just start writing queries, I’ll explain stuff as we go, ask questions as you have them, and by the end hopefully you’ll have some clue as to how this works.”

He talked about 500 miles per hour for ~4 hours, but by the end of it, three things had been accomplished.

1) We had finished some cool analysis on the login rates of our users,

2) We had learned the basics of SQL, and

3) We had 4 or 5 sample queries to play around with over the next week

How SQL Works (business guys perspective):

Now devs can do all sorts of fancy stuff with SQL, namely building tables to house your data.

As a marketer / business person though, you don’t really need any of that. You just need read-only capabilities (ideally on a so called “slave server” so you’re not screwing with the live environment) so that you can query your data and run some cool analysis.

To do this you need to understand the basics of a SQL query… which (in my business-speak) is as follows:

select — output you want to see (needs to be from the tables you’re accessing)

from — tables you need to access to get the data

where — how you need to join or link those tables (so that you access the data in the right way… think multiplying two matrices, for those who took linear algebra) — what other conditions you want to have met

group by — think of this as combining your data based on a similar value… it’s like filtering in a pivot table

order by — arrange my data in this order

limit — only send me X rows of data

; — all sql queries end in a semi-colon

That’s it. Most queries usually end up being 5 – 20 lines. There’s other slightly fancier stuff that’s also good to know about (e.g., how to run queries that spit out html tables which you can copy/paste into excel or how to run nested queries), but even with just the basics you can run some very powerful analysis.

Also check out this blog post that lists useful SQL queries.

Just Go Do It:

So for any marketers / startup marketers / wanna be marketers out there… I highly highly recommend you learn SQL. Just grab a dev on your team and ask them to spend 3 or 4 hours on a Saturday teaching you the basics and writing queries.

May you learn cool shit,

dinesh (udemy marketing guy)

*** Learn the basics with this FREE SQL tutorial for beginners on Udemy. ***

PS – So day 1 after learning SQL, I’m super excited about my newfound skills and I go home all braggy to my fiance (also a marketer), who turns to me and is like “pshhh, whatever D, I learned that stuff 6 years ago at my first job when I had just graduated college” (reminder that your significant other is always one step ahead of you… never forget it).

About the Author: Dinesh is a social entrepreneur, marketer, karaoke lover, and east coast transplant living the good life in San Francisco. He runs the marketing team at Udemy and you can find him on Twitter and Udemy.