Founders may be driven by passion - but should be influenced by facts.
Peter Drucker once said:
“If you can’t measure it,
you can’t improve it.”
While key performance indicators (KPIs) may feel like a distant need in startups, capturing the right metrics helps:
Navigate fast-paced market dynamics
Encourage agility and profitability, and
Extend cash flow
Even if you initially lack sophisticated systems and software, tracking critical metrics will best verify your experiments and inform decisions.
Here are some examples of valuable startup metrics:
Customers. Strong satisfaction impacts retention, upsells, cross-sells, and referrals, leading to growth and profitability.
Ideally, use AI tools to seek and track customers' sentiment across multiple platforms. Otherwise, ask customers through email, surveys, and focus groups.
Innovation. How many new products and services have you launched recently, and how are they affecting your business?
If possible, measure revenue from new products or services within the last year to encourage continuous innovation and adaptation to market needs.
Employees. Your team's engagement prompts customer satisfaction, product innovation, and process efficiency.
Team costs are incredibly high, so assign tasks immediately after hiring to measure performance and ensure responsibilities align with company goals.
Financials. Ensure you incorporate industry and business metrics into your discussions. For example, a SaaS company should capture CAC, LTV, churn, etc.
Also, scrutinize revenue streams to encourage revenue diversity and pricing models to balance profitability with growth.
Community. Measure social media activity leading to sales. Do your best to attribute engagement to revenues.
Second, track user communication in forums, webinars, and other platforms. How do they talk about your brand publicly?
💡 Virality and referrals will optimize growth with minimal cost. Experiment ways to increase referrals e.g. new messaging, incentives, and campaigns.
Getting Started
You may think your startup is too busy and bootstrapped to measure results and outcomes. However, these insights will be a necessary input to growth.
Start by constantly measuring available information, asking stakeholders questions, and always challenging and testing assumptions.
Feedback helps you respond to changes and identify opportunities.
Objective metrics clarify how we will grow, prevent us from succumbing to biases, and keep us experimenting to be agile as markets shift. Startups need the lift.
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