Not enough bookings.
No idea what to fix.

Hire Your Data Analyst is a self-paced online course that shows photographers how to set up their own AI data analyst inside Claude, trained on their own business records, so it reads the numbers for them. You come out with your real baselines (what you earn, what each type of client is worth, where your work comes from) and a ten-minute monthly habit that tells you how your business is doing and the three things to do about it. It's taught by Kirsty Hamilton, a London family photographer and former journalist, exactly as she runs it in her own business. There are twelve lessons, thirteen short videos and eleven PDFs, and it costs £99.

No. That's the whole point. You won't learn spreadsheets, formulas or a single piece of jargon. You set up an analyst that does the analysing, and your job is to ask it questions, check its answers and make the decisions. If you can export a report from your booking system and paste a message into Claude, you can do this.

It's a Project inside Claude with a permanent job description and a memory. You tell it once what your business is, what you sell, which systems you use and what you want to know. From then on it remembers, so every month you drop in your latest numbers and it reads them against your own baselines, rather than you re-explaining your business to a stranger each time. Think of it as a team member you hire, brief and manage, not a magic wand.

No. The course runs inside Claude, and it works best on a paid plan, but you can complete it on the free plan too. Free accounts can create Projects, so you can build and run your analyst without paying a penny. What you'll notice on the free plan is shorter sittings and a slower pace through the first big load of data; the monthly check-in is a short session by design and works on any plan. I'll show you exactly what's different so nothing catches you out.

Photographers who are already booking clients and ideally have at least a year of bookings behind them, whatever they shoot and wherever they are: families or weddings, newborns or headshots, dogs or brands. If you've been making marketing decisions on instinct because the numbers feel like someone else's job, this is built for you. If you're brand new and don't have a year of records yet, start with Launch Ready instead, where I show you how to capture the right information from your very first client.

Yes, and I'd say that as someone who's been fully booked all summer. A full diary tells you nothing about which bookings are worth the most, which marketing is paying and which is just keeping you busy, or whether the bank balance matches the effort. Your analyst shows you where you're spending energy for little return and where the profitable work is, so a busy year turns into a better-paid one instead of just a tiring one.

Less than you think. Your bank statements, your invoices and your booking system's history work from day one, and they're most of what the first load needs. If you haven't switched on Google Search Console or Google Analytics yet, that's completely normal (I hadn't looked at mine properly in seven years) and there are step-by-step cheat sheets to get them connected in week one, so they're collecting while you work.

You won't. The very first lesson is about protecting your clients before you upload anything: the privacy settings to check, the list of things that never get uploaded, and a thirty-second routine for stripping names, emails and phone numbers out of every export. Your analyst needs the patterns, not the people. Anything that goes into a Project stays available there, which is exactly why the strip happens first, every time.

It's a fair worry, and the course takes it seriously before you upload anything. First, you strip every export before it goes in: names, emails, phone numbers and account numbers come out in a thirty-second routine, so what your analyst sees is dates, amounts and categories, not people or account details. Second, the very first lesson walks you through the privacy settings in Claude, including switching off the setting that would let your conversations be used for training, so your business stays your business. Third, your analyst lives in a Project you control: you can delete anything in it, or the whole thing, at any time. And you never hand over your bank login. You export a statement yourself, strip it, and upload the file, the same way you'd send one to your accountant.

Give it a weekend, or a few evenings spread over a couple of weeks. The lessons themselves are short, most under seven minutes, and the Analyst Builder interview is a sitting of an hour or so. What takes the time is the real work around them: connecting Search Console and Google Analytics if you haven't already, exporting and stripping your files, and the first load, where your analyst reads your records and works out your baselines. That first load is the big one, and it's slower on the free plan. After that it's ten minutes a month, and it's fully self-paced, so nothing needs doing in one go.

Your real baselines first: what you typically earn in a month, the average job value for each type of client, how many enquiries turn into bookings, and where your work actually comes from. Then, every month, a one-page snapshot measured against those baselines: what's up, what's down, what it can't see yet, and the three things to do about it. It's how I spotted that proposal shoots were becoming my most valuable clients, and it's how I went from one proposal booking last July to eight this July.

Not blindly, and the course teaches you not to. AI analysis can be confidently wrong, and the first time it hands you an exciting number is exactly when you check it twice. There's a whole lesson on checking its work, using a real finding from my own business that collapsed the moment I reconciled it against my invoices. You stay the editor. The analyst does the grunt work; you decide what's true.

It's a weekend's work once, then ten minutes a month. I ran my business on instinct for years because sitting down with the data felt like a job I'd have to learn first. This takes that job off your plate. The effort is small; the thing it stops you doing, which is guessing, is what costs you.

It's the opposite. This is the thing that tells you which of your marketing is paying and which is just keeping you busy, so you can stop doing the bits that aren't. There's nothing to post, no platform to feed. Ten minutes a month, and a clearer head for the other twenty-nine days.

Then you'll know, and knowing is the whole point. A machine reading your numbers has no judgement in its voice, which makes this a much kinder way to face them than a spreadsheet and a sinking feeling. Every snapshot ends with three things to do, so you're never left with bad news and no next step. The warning signs for my own drop off page one of Google had been sitting in my data for months. I'd have given a lot to see them earlier.

Memory and method. A chat forgets your business the moment you close it, so you'd re-explain everything every time and get generic answers. Your analyst is built once, with your baselines written into its instructions, standing rules for how it checks its work, and a report format that ends in three actions. It compares this month to your business, not to some average photographer.

Yes. Nothing in the method depends on where you are or what you shoot. Your analyst is built from your own records, so it learns your seasons, your client types and your marketing channels. My examples come from my London photography business, but the method has no postcode.

Twelve lessons, thirteen short videos and eleven PDFs, plus the Analyst Builder, the guided interview that sets up your analyst in a single sitting and writes its instructions, your data schedule, your first-load brief and your monthly report format, all personalised to your business. You also get the Protect Before You Start checklist, the Get Connected cheat sheets for Search Console, Google Analytics, Instagram insights, your booking system and Google Business Profile, the checking-its-work checklist, and the seasonal-pattern sheet that teaches your analyst your calendar.

For as long as the course is live, with every update included. I don't promise lifetime access on anything, because I've been promised it myself and watched courses vanish, and because the AI tools change fast enough that a course frozen in time isn't worth much. I'd rather keep this one current and give you the updated version each time.

Yes, and no. Hire Your Data Analyst is one part of Kirsty Hamilton's twelve-week live programme for photographers, Finally Found and Actually Booked, which starts in January 2027. But it's complete on its own, and you don't need the programme to get the value from it. From the month it's built, your analyst reads your numbers, tells you where your work comes from and what each client is worth, and gives you three things to do. That's the whole job, and it's done. The programme is a different thing: a look at your whole business and the whole of your marketing, from getting found on Google and by AI, to your numbers, to a content system that markets you on purpose, with me and a small group working through all of it with you over twelve weeks. Your analyst is one of the courses inside it. If you only want the analyst, this is the course, and it's all you need.

It's a digital course with instant access, so once you're in I can't refund it, which is the same on every Podia course. That's why the who-it's-for section is honest about who should wait. If something's gone wrong with your access, email me and I'll sort it.