

Ask HN: What are the most important business metrics for your startup?  - shpxnvz

I'm working on a business dashboard for small startups and mISVs, and could use some expert input.<p>What are the important business metrics you monitor every day? How do you monitor them?<p>Which are the most actionable vs. time consuming?
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DenisM
I sell iPhone apps.

Revenue is a poor metric - lag between actions and outcome is measured in
weeks if not months. It's good to track over months, but does nothing in short
term, so is not actionable.

I want to know what is the expected "time to stop using the app" at any given
day. If this time is getting longer my app is getting better, so this gives me
a metric that's better than revenue. However, this metric can only be
accurately computed in retrospect, so I need to mine for correlations with
something that's available sooner.

Something like "people who use the app on the first day 5 minutes are likely
to drop out in two months, but people who use it on the first day for 20
minutes are likely to stay for 6 months".

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petervandijck
On a social site: active users (defined as having visited the site in the past
week).

ps: we are building a business dashboard soon, looked around and couldn't find
anything. We'd want (for multiple products), on one page:

\- traffic

\- revenue

\- new subscribers/members

with some kind of historic info, data coming in from analtyics and custom rss
feeds or something

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charlesju
The two major ones that matter are:

Cost Per Acquisition and Average Revenue Per User.

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il
Ideally the same metrics any small business uses:

-Revenue -Conversion Rate -Ad CTR -Time on site -Clickthroughs to order page -CPC/CPA -CLV

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shpxnvz
If you don't mind sharing, how do you get revenue numbers - analytics or
payment processor?

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il
Check your bank account?

