5 startups metrics you should know today

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A friend called me this morning and asked me, what is the 5 most important thing to measure for an online venture?

This is for a startup grant application form he is trying to fill. While I am not an expert in this, here’s what I told him:

Page Views

Like every businesses, awareness is key before you get any sales. In terms of a web startup, awareness is manifested and reflected as page views. Page views is the number of times a visitor view your a single page on your website. The higher your page views, the higher your awareness, the higher chance you get someone to buy and pay for a product that you are offering.

Click Through Rates/Conversions

Click through rates is the % of visitors who visit your site and click on your product. This is not the same as conversion rate, although both are directly correlated. When a visitor at your site click on one of your product and end up paying for it, the visitor is a converted visitor. A high page views ensure a high a high click through rate, which subsequently increases the conversion rate.

Disclaimer: There are other factors that affects click through rates, notably user experience. Same goes for conversions. There are a lot of factors affecting it too, including pricing and product/market fit.

Customer Acquisition Cost

The third metric which I shared with my friend is customer acquisition cost. In simple terms, it means how much does it cost to get a customer. This is usually calculated as marketing cost/total new customers. Marketing cost includes advertising + commissions + sales person + website. Depending on which industry you are in, customer acquisition cost can be as low as a few dollars (mobile apps) to hundreds of dollars (enterprise software/education).

User Demographic/Channel

“Knoweth Where Thy Customers Resideth” – Yongfook, 21 Actionable Growth Hacking Tips.

This should be fairly straight forward. You should always know who your users are and where they come from. Traditional businesses survive on this as well: Think bookstores, restaurants or barber. They are always located at places where there is a huge human traffic flow, and before they open a physical store, they choose the venue based on their target customers and where they usually frequent. The same goes for a website. You should always know who you are targeting, where they come from and how to track them. Google Analytics is a great way to help you determine these: User age group, location, which browser are they using, which language are they on. For user channel, a properly tracked website allows you to see where you are getting your users from. A good understanding of your user demographic and channel will also positively affect your page views and conversions.

Growth (Users/Revenue)

The final metric is growth rate. Growth rate for startups are usually very low as they go through a customer development phase. Early adopters make up the initial growth curve and before any startups can reach the legendary hockey stick curve, they have to “cross the chasm”.

Actually, another important metric is user retention/engagement. This metric should come before user growth.

P/S You should follow me on Twitter and check out the cool stuffs I have done!

How do you improve your writings?

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Do you wish you can write better and improve your writing skills? Yea me too.

A friend asked me earlier today on Facebook:

What do you suggest about improving technique/style?

While I’m not any expert yet, here’s what I told him.

Read a lot.

Everyone has their own way of writings. For me, i read a lot. Like A LOT. I especially like Svbtle.

Svbtle is a community made up of hundreds of writers whose expertise spans many disciplines, from entrepreneurship, biology, and finance to anthropology, political science, and literature. Because the community is handpicked and thoughtfully curated, there are amazing content from thought leaders penning down their opinions there. It is a great way to discover new opinions, how people voice them out, how people pen down their thoughts, and how they write.

Svbtle

My backlog for all the great posts on Svbtle

Study and let your writing style develop on its own.

I dont copy the writing styles of the various Svbtle authors, but I keep them at the back of my mind, and I let my style of writing develop on its own. At the end of the day, you have to develop your own style of writing. While i write professionally at e27, my personal blog has a clear distinction in terms of how I write versus my voice at e27. When I start blogging on Quora next week, I will develop another kind of writing style, a more detailed and data backed writing style.

Start a blog. Write a lot.

The next thing is to start your own personal blog. The more you write, the better you become. It’s like swimming. Of course, writing a lot also means, develop a consistent habit of writing, and that requires a lot of discipline. A lot of great potential authors never had the chance to realize how good they are simply because they never had to discipline to constantly write and constantly rediscover themselves.

3 types of people at work

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There are three kinds of people at work:

  1. The ones who are learning and improving – high growth curve, usually new graduates, startup environment
  2. The ones who are working for the money – low growth curve, mundane and repetitive job scope, high paycheck, corporate/banks
  3. The ones who are good at what they are in and enjoy what they do – comfort zone, decent paycheck, performs reasonably well, your typical senior executives.

If you fall under category two, make sure that you give yourself a time limit as to how long you stay in that job. Because your company is compensating you to work and accept a lower intellectual growth curve. This is fine but if you think of intellectual learning as a compounding asset, then suddenly, you will have much more to lose.

Is it possible for a startup guy to go back to a corporate world?

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I would think the answer is no. 

The more I am involved in the startup scene, the more skills i acquire from my work, the more I think it is super hard to go back to the corporate world.

Maybe I am biased.

Starting up your own company or working for a startup company/environment empowers you to move fast, be flexible, and deliver an actual impact to the company. This can be very addictive.

Of course, you can get this experience too if you are working for a corporate, but you have to be at the senior management. How do you get to the senior management level? Either you have been with the company since it’s early days when it was still a startup, or either you have a solid experience which you acquire through your own startup or through other successful startups. We dont often see senior positions in corporate being filled with guys mainly with strong academic qualifications anymore.

So at the root of every senior management role, a startup experience plays a huge role.

The more skills you acquire through a startup too, the more you realize that you could no longer fit into a startup environment. In startup you learn to be agile, you learn to execute and experiment, you learn to empower yourself, you learn to make quick and sometimes hard decision.

In a corporate, you are expected to do your work. And wait for the huge paycheck. And the paycheck pays you to accept a lower learning curve. 

So is it possible for a startup guy to go back to a corporate world? I think it’s quite tough. Once you are used to a startup environment, it can be hard to switch your gears, and it could be hard to quantify and qualify your skills to a corporate world as they usually look for a very specific skillset.

This is how I work

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Give me a task, give me a reasonable date of delivery, if I agree to it, I will delivery on time, no more, no less.

There is no need to check on me, and you can trust that I will deliver and I will let you know in advance notice if I needed help or if I cannot delivery.

I also expect myself to deliver results I am satisfied with, this is because it is reasonably expected of me.

And because of that, I expect presentable, if not the best results, from my partners and the people who is working with me.

Launching your product

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It is common for us to be emotionally attached to the product we have spent weeks or months building. Because of that emotional attachment, we tend to forget this: we are probably the only ones in the world who care about the product. While this is commonly shared and told by those who have been there and done that,  nobody cares about your product. So, don’t let any minor details slow you down in pushing that “launch now” button.

You would probably be thinking to nail everything right to its details and to build the best product for your customers. Remember, there is no such thing as perfection. Product goes through a constant process of iteration. The following picture probably wont happen:

“Launch the product, share on Facebook, 100+ shares, local tech blogs picked you up, hit top 10 on hacker news, 10000 page views, 5% conversion, 500+ sign ups per day!”

It probably looked more like this:

“Launch the product, share on Facebook, 5 likes from your best friends, submit post on Hacker News, begs friends to upvote it, 100 total page views, 3-4 sign ups from potential competitors.”

The fact is, growth and sales is a fine combination of: Great product complemented by great features + nailing UX (in terms of conversion) + community empowerment (more on this another day) + top notch customer experience and satisfaction + affordable pricing + product/market fit + speed to market/execution + a bit of luck.

So launching the product is just step 1 and makes up only a tiny fraction of the full equation. Your product doesnt just end after you launch it, in fact, it just started. And it is disheartening sometimes that there are founders whom hold back their v1.0 launch because they want to perfect a certain product feature or perfecting the font size.

So startup founders, get your minimum presentable product (i dont believe in minimum viable product) out now and just launch it, and iterate with the feedbacks from your customers who might care about it. The magical moment when your website is live, will last for 1 minute (okay maybe 5 minutes) and that’s about it. Once you launch, there are a lot of things to optimize: pricing, features, sign up page, UI, some bugs here and there. Don’t perfect the product to its details because you might end up changing them again based on actual customer feedbacks. Focus on getting feedbacks and focus on providing your customers with the best experience.

Best way to do this: have a strict schedule and stick to it. If it is agreeable from the beginning that the product is to be launched 2 months later, launch it regardless. This is very important to cultivate the sense of discipline in the team. Any delay in schedules will be used as future “references” or act as a precedence. As a result, future urgency will be taken less seriously.

I’ve sticked to my schedule. Got it launched in 2 months, from inception of idea, to single handedly secured 30+ partners, to UI/UX, product development, pricing strategy, marketing and working with a designer and a developer.

And yes, nobody cared about the launch yet.

We must all suffer one of two things the pain of discipline or the pain of regret and disappointment Jim Rohn

You should follow me on Twitter:  @Jackyyapp

Amway still lives

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Screen Shot 2013-03-15 at 1.18.50 AM

Ashok Harwani Messages
Thoughts: I should have known better. MLM. And what is my understanding of business? I dont really know how to answer this. Decision: Rejected straight away at the first sign of MLM. Screen Shot 2013-03-15 at 1.19.22 AMThoughts: Asked me if I know anyone who might be interested but never disclose anything at all about what the “business” is. How can I recommend/How can I get my friends involve into something without knowing what it is? Of course, Ashok later disclosed his “business”, and what do you know: Alticor, or more commonly known as, AMWAY.

Until today, it still amazes me that they still survive, and there are still people who evangelize about their products, looking around for “sharp and ambitious” individuals to join them.

Amway has got to be the best MLM company to date. Amazing.