

Startup Metrics for Pirates - pclark
http://www.slideshare.net/dmc500hats/startup-metrics-for-pirates-seedcamp-sept-2009

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skolor
I was hoping this would be about startup costs for something like Somalian
pirates...

As a note, slides are sometimes good without the accompanying speech. I did
not feel this was one of those situations. From my experience, the more you
get out of just slides, the less overall quality the talk was (as a note, this
implies that this talk was relatively good).

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pclark
really? I haven't seen a more packed slide set of _stuff_ it isn't saying
"acquire customers" it's saying "acquire customers, and here are a ton of
methods"

handy.

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skolor
Right, my problem with this particular set of slides wasn't being too vague,
it was that it was a little too busy/crammed with information to really make
sense of it. While it looked valuable, it seems more difficult to extract it
from the slides than it is worth (at least to me). I'm sure seeing a
presentation on it would be well worth the time, however.

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quellhorst
Audio for this talk at SXSW. <http://odeo.com/episodes/23012329> Video of
talk. [http://startonomics.com/blog/welcome-to-startonomics-and-
sta...](http://startonomics.com/blog/welcome-to-startonomics-and-startup-
metrics-for-pirates-aarrr/)

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wavesplash
Take these slides with a grain of salt. Dave's slides are decent for low-touch
symmetric high-volume consumer web sites (B2C). Not so great for B2B or
asymmetric businesses.

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pclark
Acquisition, Retention, Referral and Revenue apply to almost every business...

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wavesplash
Very loosely. You have to understand the nature of a business before you start
prescribing metrics to watch. A manufacturer wouldn't use these as success
metrics. If we just focus on web-tech we're still left with a buch of
questions: Is the business B2C, B2B, Symmetric (User pays) or Asymmetric (3rd
party pays - e.g. Google users vs. Google advertisers)?

For asymmetric businesses or high-dollar ($10k+/sale) enterprise/B2B most of
these metrics are good-intentioned but likely to send the business astray.

For example: in low-volume/high-dollar B2B and most enterprise, 98% of the
time needs to be spent focused on Average Sales Price (ASP) and Average Time
to Close (ATC). To minimize ATC and maximize ASP you're trying to listen
closely to pain points, determine champions, help win cross department fiefdom
battles, get the purchasing department to pay before your company runs out of
cash, etc.

Dave's suggested metrics start coming into play for symmetric low-dollar
subscriptions to thousands and 10s of thousands. These are the types of
markets he understands well, and that's aok, but that's not everyone's
business and the advise should be taken with a grain of salt.

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pclark
The title "Startup Metrics for Pirates" still obscures the actual value of
this.

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sachinag
Depends, actually. If you're familiar with Dave's AARRR, referencing "pirate
metrics" is enough to have a conversation with many, many people. It doesn't
describe the content in a literal fashion, but as a name for something to be
discussed, it's fantastic.

