

How to use metrics in a startup - swombat
http://swombat.com/2011/2/10/how-to-use-metrics-in-a-startup

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rubidium
>So, when you put in a new feature, don't measure "how many people used the
new feature", measure "whether people who had access to the new feature were
more likely to pay"

I like that part. Jim Collins ("Good to Great") recommended to have one metric
that "drives your economic engine". For a startup, you may not know what your
economic engine is yet (still be pivoting an all that) but at least be
measuring for a metric that relates to your economic, not popular, appeal.

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far33d
In most early web startups, the biggest challenge (and the most common reason
for death) is acquiring and retaining customers. User metrics are completely
valid as your primary metrics early on.

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joshhepworth
I think you're getting at a very interesting conflict here that the author of
the article attempted to explain. While user metrics can gauge the success of
a web startup, that's often all they can do. Those metrics will (potentially)
tell the company if they're improving or declining, and if they should be
taking action.

However, it will not tell the company what actions to take. They're nowhere
near as useful as a targeted, action specific metric in determining what to
do. If my website's # of visitors drops 50% over a week, there might be
something wrong, but I don't know what action to take without more
information. Figuring out what engages users on the site and what keeps them
coming back and measuring those things would be way more useful than simply
knowing how many users are visiting.

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far33d
If you track traffic sources with high granularity and get lots of traffic
from ads or viral channels, you can get actionable data from traffic metrics.

Overall I agree - actionable metrics are the most important. I just take issue
with the idea that only revenue related metrics are important.

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smackay
I was expecting an article on how to measure performance in a startup - an
interesting topic in itself given the fluid nature of the environment which
makes it difficult to measure many important aspects - but the article seems
to conflate web stats and metrics and does not offer much that is interesting
or actionable.

Interestingly, the word metric is used 55 times in the article.

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brc
Perhaps you missed the point. Using metrics is important to decide what
actions to take, or, more accurately, measuring whether a taken action lead to
an important outcome.

It's no good just measuring visits or even conversions. What is important is
measuring whether action a increased visits/conversions better than action b.
The fluid nature of a startup means that most people probably don't know -
there's no corporate history to lean on - and thus making careful use of
metrics even more important.

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ilcavero
No discussion about metrics can be complete without mentioning the GQM
approach. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GQM>

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jdp23
That's a great point. My thinking about metrics got noticeably clearer after I
discovered GQM.

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bradleyjoyce
> When not to use metrics... If your traffic is too low for metrics to be
> meaningful, then measuring metrics is largely a waste of time, and making
> decisions based on statistical noise is potentially harmful.

This is very very true. However, this should not deter you from making sure
you have all the data tracking in place very very very early on. It's a HUGE
pain to add metrics tracking later when you're growing like crazy.

