Decide your data model before you touch a single feature

Decide your data model before you touch a single feature

The reflex is to start with the fun stuff: the email designer, the landing page builder, the workflow canvas. Resist it. The first hour belongs to the data model, because every feature you configure later reads from and writes to it. If the underlying contact structure is wrong, you build a beautiful funnel on sand.

Start with the contact properties you will actually segment and report on, and define them deliberately. Lifecycle stage, lead source, persona, industry, the one or two custom fields your business genuinely runs on. Use dropdowns and defined values, never free text, because a free-text field becomes "Marketing", "marketing", "Mktg" and "MKT" within a week, and then no segment you build is trustworthy. The whole point of structured data is that you can slice it later, and you can only slice what you constrained up front.

Define your lifecycle stages and what each one means in one sentence. A subscriber is someone on your list who has not raised their hand. A lead has shown intent. A marketing-qualified lead has hit the bar your sales team agreed to. Write the definition next to the stage, because the moment two people disagree about what "MQL" means, your reporting becomes fiction and your sales team stops trusting the handoff.

Keep the model lean. Every property you create is a property someone has to populate, govern, and not let rot. A hub with forty custom fields, half of them empty, is harder to work in than one with the eight that matter. Configure the fields your funnel decisions depend on, and add more only when a real decision needs one.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What is your minimum viable set of contact properties for a B2B client on day one, and which field do teams always over-engineer that you cut?