Getting Started with Tranquil Data “Dragons”

Last week we announced the impending Early Access for our new “Dragons” release. We explained what Data Context is and how it drives the core product. We also went deep on a streamlined second product edition that’s part of the “Dragons” release and represents a generational leap forward in how data is unlocked and used. To help you get started with Tranquil Data, it’s worth taking a few minutes to explain why we picked this flow, and how it represents macro trends that are shaping the future of data-driven value.

Common Challenges

We designed the Tranquil Data™ Trusted Flow Edition after working with dozens of companies, from pre-seed to mature enterprise (more on this below). We listened to how and why they wanted to apply our core capabilities, and started to see common pain-points:

1. Legal and privacy roles need move beyond documenting policy and actually drive enforcement to help their business unlock opportunity
2. Shifting-left on privacy is critical to business value if data is going to be a driver and differentiator for how you grow your company
3. Gaining trust and winning strong user engagement is increasingly difficult without transparency & user-centricity
4. Automation for 1–3, and proof that platforms are behaving correctly, needs to replace today’s manual inventory & policing processes

As an example, look at the results of a recent study on digital health done by the American Medical Association. They found that nearly 70% of patients surveyed hesitated to use an offering due to privacy concerns, more than 60% decided not to use offerings that addressed a known health issue because of those concerns, and 80% wanted the ability to opt-out of at least some data sharing. Visibility and control (3) are requirements for customer acquisition and organizations as a whole must embrace this as business value (2). Offering transparency that data is used correctly requires that the policy owners have the ability to enforce those policies (1) and have confidence that any ensuing processes are met (4).

Product Goals

With these principles in-mind, we focused our new offering on key goals that we believe are core to any modern data-driven business:

• Give legal and privacy roles an end-to-end solution that enforces data use across an organization, just as Salesforce empowers sales roles
• Make the solution trivial to integrate, and able to replace ad hoc policy implementation, so that dev roles see a significant gain in productivity
• Give sales, marketing, and other data consumers self-service, purpose-driven UIs, so they stop bothering legal and privacy teams (see below)
• Drive engagement with always-on, easy to define and enforce, fine-grained discretionary consent as a core platform capability
• Automate-away the complexity of knowing when and why users must re-consent to terms, and automatically acquire re-consent as needed
• Use all of these to provide the foundation for personalized and business-centric Generative AI

When we talked with legal and privacy roles, one of the frequent comments we heard is that they spend at least 50% of their time responding to questions like “can I include these users in the following marketing campaign” or “which sets of third-party data can I use to train this algorithm”. This often takes the form of a slack channel or email group, and it can take days to respond with the right answer. Our self-service UI takes candidate data and automatically returns the valid, redacted sub-set for the stated purpose, along with proof that this process was run. This accelerates business activity and returns massive amounts of time to legal & privacy roles to focus on forward-looking tasks.

Similarly, we heard that rolling out new terms can take months, cost significant time and money, and put the company at-risk (if the change isn’t clear to users) or trigger customer attrition (if users hear about too many updates too often). Our solution automates this process so that our customers save tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, grow trusted engagement, ensure compliance with changing regulations, and free up teams to focus on building new business value.

Target Users

When we first started working on Tranquil Data, the common response was something like “this sounds like a compliance solution for the F250.” As we’ve explained above, the goals aren’t strictly about compliance, but about shifting where companies spend time and helping to accelerate new revenue and market opportunities. This said, yes, we purposefully built a product that appeals to enterprise and solves for the complex framework of requirements across regulations, contracts, and individual privacy. When we work with companies in the enterprise space it’s often with a specific regulatory driver in-mind, a focus on connecting disparate data across organizations, or a desire to drive more direct end-user engagement.

In addition to established companies, we also built our product with mid-tier private companies in-mind. Whether you’re valued at $10M or $1B, you’re trying to grow. This means attacking new market verticals, expanding into new geographies, taking on new kinds of customers, and/or solving for more complex (and therefore more valuable) challenges. Each of these at some point results in having to ask your counsel or privacy officer “can we sign up for these contract and/or regulatory requirements?” No lawyer wants to be the one saying “no” but in practice getting to “yes” brings with it massive business risk and technical complexity. With Tranquil Data, we help companies on these journeys get to yes quickly.

Finally, we designed a simple & ubiquitous product for pre-seed companies that are just getting started. Any automation clearly results in less spending and faster time to market, and when we help start-ups automate key tasks those companies can pitch investors on why they’ll tackle growth opportunities faster. More importantly, if you’re the CEO of a startup you need to be data-literate and have a clear view of exactly how and why your company collects and uses data. This needs to be in your company DNA from day-one as a first-principle and differentiator that drives product and revenue, whether your focus is Cyber, DevOps, GenAI, Marketing, Consumer, Entertainment, or Finance. Tranquil Data helps you acquire and apply differentiated data to accelerate your value dramatically without risk. To give you an example, here are the slides from a presentation our founder gave to the StartupHealth ecosystem on day-one data planning.

Adoption Drivers

So, what would lead you to adopt Tranquil Data? One driver we’ve already talked about is the need for stronger engagement. We see this across verticals and geographies, whether it’s about fostering trust with end-users or proving to B2B partners that you’re a great steward of their data, as a way to acquire customers and keep them engaged. This is being enshrined in how the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is requiring personalized and clear terms as part of the Affirmative Express Consent process, and it is the central challenge today when we talk about how Generative AI can be used in the enterprise space. When Amazon says that “data is the differentiator”, they’re really saying that without transparent user-engagement, and trust that data is always used correctly, you can’t unlock the data that you need to win.

Another driver (which we just mentioned in the context of the FTC) is consent. Increasingly, we’re seeing that strong engagement is anchored in discretionary consent: giving users a choice to share their data in exchange for some tangible outcome. That could be as simple as opt-in marketing that comes with discounts or promotions. In the US, there’s a movement by Pharma and BioTech to engage with users directly, at their discretion, to recruit trial participants and/or sources of Real-World Evidence (RWE) in exchange for helping users with specific health journeys. In the EU last summer we saw Meta forced to implement several forms of consent, and the up-coming EU Data Act is squarely focused on giving consumers control over their data, both for privacy and for a right-to-repair. When privacy shifts all the way to the left you get transparency through consent.

A third key driver for adopting Tranquil Data, that we’ve also covered briefly, is revenue. There’s a lot of money being “left on the table” due to risk. In the previous example, Pharma would love to engage directly with patients but the risk is difficult to manage. Gaming and Social Media companies want to interact with teens and pre-teens, but regulations like COPPA (as well as old-fashioned common-sense) make the risk untenable. More urgent is the need to bring the digital health revolution to adolescents, especially in the realm of metal health and rare diseases, but the interaction of COPPA, HIPAA, state regulations, and parental rights makes the risk almost impossible to navigate. Too often something that makes good business sense, or if commercialized would have a positive impact on society, is not addressed because the risk is simply too high. See the previous discussion about getting lawyers to say “yes.” Tranquil Data unlocks these market, revenue, and societal opportunities.

To be clear, these aren’t abstract examples. They are all specific drivers that the Tranquil Data™ Trusted Flow Edition solves today, at-scale, out of the box. We are working with our community on how consent unlocks new digital health and RWE models. We are supporting companies on the EU Data Act as it moves towards enforcement and proving that it can be addressed at massive scale. We are handling the nuance of parental consent, age-based controls, and the rationale for why data trains any given algorithm.

Taking Advantage of our Early Access Program

In this article we’ve covered the motivation for our product, but more importantly, we’ve laid out the future of how data will drive engagement and unlock value. Transparency, clearly enforced correct use, automated processes, and user-centric models are the path to unlocking differentiation and personalized data. This isn’t just about technology, but about how everyone, from your CEO down, understands and participates in the role data plays in an organization’s growth. Tranquil Data is the only solution that embodies this, that starts with the roles that own and define the rules for data acquisition, use, and sharing, and that ensures as an organization grows they’re on the rails.

If you self-identified with any of the drivers, users, goals, or challenges that we laid out here, get in touch for early access. We have room for a number of turn-key users, and still have a few slots open for anyone who needs a customized solution. We look forward to helping you build a tranquil data-driven solution.