How a WBS graduate used his data analytics skills to build a business

It was towards the end of his first degree that Daniar Rusnak realised that data science was going to be his future.

By the following autumn, he was sitting down to his first lecture on the MSc Business Analytics course at Warwick Business School.

And by his late twenties, he was running his own data analysis business.

“I was finishing off my BA Law and Business Studies degree at the University of Warwick, and in both spheres, I could see that ‘big data’ was going to be the phenomenon of the next 10 to 20 years,” Daniar says.

“I suppose it was a ‘bread on the table’ decision. I could see myself being employed in the field.”

His MSc Business Analytics degree was spent delving into statistical methods, predictive modelling and some machine learning with a well-established community of data scientists.

This, Daniar says, stood him in good stead “for the journey ahead”.

“Most of all, the course taught me that it’s not enough just to collect your data, you have to understand it too,” he says.

The degree took him to a graduate job at Amazon, but very soon a start-up firm from his native Slovakia was knocking on his door.

Bloomreach had developed a software platform that helped ecommerce firms personalise their offerings to customers with the help of better data collection, analysis and activation; and thanks to his English skills and background in analytics, the company wanted Daniar to be their first UK consultant at a new office in London.

Employing the right machine learning algorithms

The WBS alum spent two years in London helping the marketing teams of various clients develop their operations for e-commerce, using the paradigm he had first learnt at WBS.

“At the bottom of the data pyramid is the data tracking but if you are to move up that pyramid, it is a matter of employing the right machine learning tools and other methods to interpret, evaluate and process that data into something meaningful,” he says.

“You have to understand your data before you can gain any value out of it, or base any actions such as personalised emails or ad optimisation on it.”

In 2019, Daniar moved back to Slovakia – to its capital, Bratislava – after being asked by Bloomreach to start up a new department. It was an academy aimed at educating users of the technology he now knew so well.

But then the Covid pandemic arrived.

As for so many people, the pandemic brought a wind of change for the WBS graduate. It was now that he decided to strike out with a company of his own with a former work colleague, Lukas Bihary.

“I had done some consulting work with local SMEs during my time at Warwick, and had always wanted to start up my own consultancy,” he says. “Now I saw an opportunity with the technology I knew, and knowing that there were more and more companies out there using it.”

In April 2020, Datacop was born.

In the early days, it was solely the two co-founders working together but now the marketing techstack firm employs around 10 consultants, and has a band of loyal clients, including clothing outfits Melin, OluKai and Roark, which have been with them since the beginning.

“I think the pandemic definitely played a role in our growth,” says Daniar. “At first, most of our clients were in the US, but working in digital and with data, it just didn’t matter. We quickly became an extended part of these companies’ marketing teams.”    

As the business continues to grow, he is hoping to expand his team to around 25, and more than double his revenues to around $1 million a year.

The democratisation of data

Daniar is “happy to be profitable” but also sees data science as a wider phenomenon than helping retailers sell their wares. Much of his fascination for the subject stems from the fact that it is counter-intuitive.

“That’s sort of the point, right? A business may perceive something about their customers or their sales, but if they could only read and understand the figures properly, the data might be telling them something entirely different,” he says.

 “As companies wake up to this, we will have a democratisation of data, in which data flows will no longer just be in the hands of a small team of specialists but will also be used by a larger group of managers and decision-makers.

“Just as our forebears became literate in reading and writing, we will have to become more data literate.”

The implications extend far beyond business as well.

“We all saw the deluge of statistics that came with the pandemic, and the importance of data literacy for decision-making,” Daniar says.   

“Just think how much progress we could make against the great problems of our age such as climate change, if we could all learn how to understand the data and the insights the science can bring.”

The MSc Business Analytics degree at Warwick Business School offers students a major opportunity to build their quantitative consultancy skills.

Learn more about business analytics on the four-day Executive Education course Business Analytics for Executives at WBS London at The Shard.