Pay Attention To Your Startup Metrics Or Get Off The Pot

I want to have a moment for metrics. Because the startup metrics that you use to track your startup and track your company are what will separate you from everyone else out there and make the difference between whether or not your startup is going to succeed or fucking suck.

Let’s talk about what I mean when I say metrics.

I don’t mean fancy sounding jargon and crap, and I don’t mean anything that doesn’t directly and unarguably influence where you’re going and how you’re getting there.

When you’re building out a company, you need to be extremely certain that you’re monitoring the progress you have made.

Companies that do not monitor their progress so that they can understand what does and doesn’t work are going to blow it. It’s not a question of If, it’s a question of when.

If you come to me right now, and you tell me that you have no idea what it looks like for you company to be doing well, doing badly or doing totally fucking average, then I have to tell you that you don’t understand how to build anything.

If you come to me and you tell me that you don’t have a firm grasp of what numbers to track, how to track them, how to report on them and how to make changes to your company based on the hardcore, concrete metrics, then…

You’re Pretty Much Fucked

I always use this example when I’m talking about startup metrics.

Imagine that you’re driving down a country road in your parents’ 98 Ford Falcon.

You’re driving down the road and your car breaks down. It full on shits itself. It’s not going to go anywhere, anytime soon.

So you start tinkering with it, and trying to get a spark, a sign of life, anything.

But the tricky part is, you don’t know what’s broken. You don’t know what’s fucked and where it’s fucked. How do you fix it? How do you even start to fix it?

You can fiddle with every single bit of the car for as long as you want while you try and figure it out, but you have to understand, none of that is actually fixing anything.

It’s fact finding at best. You’re not having any kind of positive impact. You’re not making any kind of positive progress.

You’re throwing yourself at a whole bunch of problems that you don’t understand, that might not even exist, because you don’t have enough knowledge of your car’s engine to identify and fix the problem.

The right time to be worrying about that engine wasn’t when it broke down.

It was in the months leading up to that point, when you could have been monitoring it, getting it serviced and identifying the issues and the potential issues.

If you understand your company as an engine that you need to monitor and service and maintain and upgrade from time to time, you’ll start to see the importance of your metrics.

Because your startup metrics are what are going to allow you to understand the health of that engine, understand where there are problems, and understand what you need to do to ensure that you don’t break the fuck down.

Here’s A Story About Measuring Startup Metrics

When I was working with a company based out of the USA not too long ago, we were focussed on solving virtual reality content creation for bloggers.

The company was in what we called Stealth Mode, which really meant we weren’t ballsy enough and didn’t believe enough to tell people what the hell we were working on, because we didn’t have the faith in the product or ourselves that level of openness actually requires.

From the start, we couldn’t agree on our metrics. We couldn’t agree on what would make what we were doing successful, in any area. I can remember arguments about what metrics would prove meaningful progress in:

• Marketing (when you’re in stealth, what the fuck kind of metrics are meaningful there?)
• Development (when you don’t know what you’re building, how do you know what metrics actually have any kind of value?)
• ….and literally everything else.

We barely even got off the drawing board. We spent so much time sitting on the pot, because we were deathly afraid of doing anything, and we didn’t know how we’d know if what we were doing was meaningful to begin with. That was a ridiculous situation, a ridiculous scenario and — as I’m sure you can already tell by the fact that I’m not a VR billionaire, it didn’t end well.

In every single company with which I’ve been involved, when we didn’t have a clear handle on our metrics and what they should and shouldn’t be and how we should and shouldn’t track them it has always ended the same way as that little would-be VR startup. With finger pointing, animosity and the aching sense that we really didn’t end up doing anything meaningful.

Because I promise you, that if you don’t know this stuff, you’ll wish you did after your company is just another blank space on your CV while you’re applying for some job at a big corporation who won’t give a damn about you beyond what you do when you punch in and out.

[This post by Jon Westenberg first appeared on Medium and has been reproduced with permission.]

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