

Show HN: the6pct : a tool to help you track weekly growth based on PG's essay - c1sc0
http://the6pct.com
Built this as a quickie to help me apply the method outlined in PG's Startup = Growth essay.
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calinet6
"Are you measuring your weekly growth?" No, and for very good reason. For
pete's sake, you should _not_ be measuring your growth numerically and
targeting it weekly. This is _not_ what Paul meant, and I don't think it's
what he would recommend.

Growth happens on a larger and more complex scale than a weekly sum.
Furthermore, if you're expecting your actions for any given week to correlate
directly with growth that happens that week, you're doing it wrong.

Do you need to work hard? Of course. Should you procrastinate? Of course not.
Is the key to this _tracking your weekly growth._ No! You risk misdirecting
your efforts, becoming far too short-sighted, and falling into the dangerous
trap of running your company only on those quantifiable and measurable
numbers. You risk missing the complexity which results in growth, and instead
narrowing your focus to the point where it actually _stagnates_ growth or
produces the wrong kind of growth.

See W. Edwards Deming's management treatise that helped bring Japan out of a
recession—[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principles)
\- one of his recommendations was to "Eliminate management by objective.
Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with
leadership." And a pitfall he pointed out—"Running a company on visible
figures alone." More can be found in his books, which mostly are targeted
toward manufacturing but I find apply incredibly well to software business.

Please, don't limit yourself to this sort of narrow-minded analysis of your
business, or at least be very aware of the consequences and consider it only
as an interesting result, never use it as a target or benchmark, and
especially don't use it to try to motivate or pressure your employees. Your
results will slowly shift toward optimizing your measured goal alone, and your
company will become as narrow and pointless as the number.

Can this metric be used? Of course. You can look back on your efforts over the
long (or short) term, and if you see a decent 6% growth rate, great. If you
don't, then you may need to change something. But you have to understand it
intimately; that it's not a goal, not a target, but a simple metric to be used
post-facto to make useful and realistic changes to your strategy. I'm not
warning you against using all numeric analysis, but I am warning against using
it as a true goal or target. Just keep it in perspective, and I fear a web
site that makes the metric as clear and visible as this site does brings it
far too close to the front of your daily attention than it should be.

Growth comes from many complex sources, toward many time frames and
overarching goals; and the target is not a weekly number, but instead, a
growing and sustainable company. Work toward that.

~~~
c1sc0
PG: We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate they think they can hit,
and then just try to hit it every week. The key word here is "just." If they
decide to grow at 7% a week and they hit that number, they're successful for
that week. There's nothing more they need to do. But if they don't hit it,
they've failed in the only thing that mattered, and should be correspondingly
alarmed. </unquote>

Maybe the caveat should be: "If you want to play the high-growth startup
game". Measuring weekly growth apparently is a tool that works _in that
context_.

~~~
calinet6
Perhaps I disagree with PG. I stand by my post. However you're correct, in
that context it could be a useful metric when the goals are very focused, the
targets are well defined, and the growth is directly correlated. He could be
entirely right in this context, you're right.

It is my opinion that this sort of thinking builds unsustainable companies.
There either needs to be an incredible shift in the way growth is looked at
and achieved at some point in the company's life (which to me, seems unlikely
or at least a difficult change of course)—or the company can start out with
sustainable growth in mind. There is no reason that a company designed for
overall quality rather than speed cannot _also_ be a fast growing company; but
I think they'll look at their strategy much differently. And that way of
thinking will last them through hiring, market expansion, and beyond.

Maybe they are compatible strategies and I'm just over-thinking it. But I
can't help but see the recent articles about how few long-term successful
companies arise from tech accelerators and think how strikingly relevant they
are.

~~~
c1sc0
I tried to keep the6pct sparse on purpose. I think it's the focus that helps.
But you're right, this should come with a pharma-sized disclaimer & I'm afraid
I didn't do a great job at that, not even in the accompanying blog post:

<http://fr.anc.is/2012/09/26/the-6-pct/>

The key is: _if you are ready & willing to play the high-growth startup game_

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StavrosK
This is exactly what I'm aiming for in developing Instahero
(<http://www.instahero.com>). Your traditional analytics software has all this
data, why can't you get a metric you need right away?

Instahero lets you just write one or two lines of Lua and visualize/report on
any metric you want.

Sorry about the plug, this tool is just similar to what I'm working on to
solve a more general problem.

~~~
c1sc0
Instahero looks cool. I was using geckoboard & I though pg's suggestion of
focussing on a single metric made a lot of sense, given the amount of time I
see startups spend on custom metrics of all colors & stripes.

~~~
StavrosK
There's definitely a tendency for people to focus on vanity metrics, so pg's
way makes a lot of sense. My post here is a bit orthogonal, I guess, since
pg's essay and your tool are about what to measure, whereas my post is about
how.

That said, I do like the tool, it's very easy and straightforward, good job!

~~~
c1sc0
Maybe you can take the idea & turn it into something for instahero? Think
"landing pages" for certain types of metrics pre-configured. instahero/weekly-
visits | instahero/weekly-subscribers | instahero/weekly-visits |
instahero/weekly-revenue etc ...

I like the idea of having a single page per metric

~~~
StavrosK
Yep, something like this:

<http://www.instahero.com/project/wWhe4J/report/jRa9Qz/>

This is very easy to create using whichever metric you like (I will probably
include it as one of the pre-made report templates, too), and you can extend
it to report on whatever you like.

Thank you very much for the idea!

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philip_roberts
Great simple idea, but I don't really understand what the json is supposed to
look like. You say:

"GET <http://yoursite.com/secret> returns {"data": [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]}"

But is that an array of data for the last seven days, or the current week, or
is it 7 separate analytics that I want to get tracked?

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philip_roberts
Also "Right place and right time to suit the right situation. this is some
more fille" :) looks like you have some filler text to rip out.

~~~
c1sc0
fille ... that is for ze ladies in french of course ;-) ... fixing it as we
speak

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silverlight
Should the JSON returned be the set of weekly numbers or daily numbers? It
doesn't say and since you mention that it's going to be crawled daily it seems
like it would be daily numbers...

~~~
c1sc0
Daily numbers indeed but I'm open for suggestions.

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blacktar
I can haz readymade Apple ITC API import? Me so lazy. ;)

