How To Measure Your Product

Tweet

My notes on this video by Suhail Doshi the founder of Mixpanel.

General thoughts

Suhail is great and he summarizes everything you should consider about metrics when creating your startup nonetheless this is a really high overview of what measuring entails.

If you are searching for something more deep and actionable maybe try with Lean Analytics.

Questions you’ll likely need to answer in the first 24 months of your startup

1. Is my product easy to understand?

2. Is it easy to get started with my product (For customers)?

3. Are people coming back to my product?

Those 3 are the most important questions you could ask yourself when building your startup.

The formula for a successful startup

These nexts factors are the levers for your successful startup. The more you have down the funnel, the better you do.

Visits

People hitting your landing page or mobile app screen.

+ Sign ups

The number of people who then sign up.

+ People who found value

The number of people who do the thing the product was made for.

+ Retention

The number of people who then subsequently come back and do that valuable thing again.

+ Spread the product

The number of people who want other people to know about your product (sharing, word of mouth, sales, etc).

= Growth

The basics are really important.

All of the levers mentioned before are the basics. Most startup founders never get the basics right.

They overcomplicate their metrics with thousands of fancy KPI’s that are just vanity metrics and ignore the really important stuff.

If you focus on the basics and get them right. You’ll grow.

1. Pick 3–5 metrics.

2. These are things that guide the team.

You should be able to assess why you’re not growing with this simple formula

This is how the funnel looks like

Once you know why you’re not growing then you should be able to take action on a lever & fix it.

How to answer the 3 most important questions?

Ways to measure your product being easy to understand

1. Do people bother to sign up?

2. Ratio of single page visits to multi-page engagement

3. B2B: Do they visit your pricing page?

4. Consumer: Performing A/B tests of your copywriting

Ways to measure your product being easy to get started

1. People who do one valuable thing (ie: watch a video)

2. Measure a funnel of your initial user experience

3. Speed to doing that valuable

Tips and tricks to make it easy to get started

1. Email/text confirmations will have significant drop-off

2. Constantly iterate on your initial user experience

3. Let users in the product before asking them to sign up

Ways to measure people coming back

Poor retention is often the most ignored metric by early founders. It’s often the reason even products with millions of users die.

1. New users who came back 1 week + 30 days later to do a valuable thing again.

2. Number of people who use the product every day (DAU instead of MAU)

3. B2B: Revenue churn — monthly $ lost in a given month

What if I have < 50 customers?

Talk to your customers. Write everything down. You will always get more information from talking to customers than checking it on a graph.

Pick one north star & choose 3–5 metrics. Less is more.

A frequent mistake is having too many metrics that you monitor.

Advanced resources

1. 16 startup metrics:https://a16z.com/2015/08/21/16-metrics/

2. After the Techcrunch bump:http://redeye.firstround.com/2008/01/after-the-techc.html

3. On Negative Churn:http://tomtunguz.com/negative-churn/

4. A/B testing by Eric Ries:http://www.startuplessonslearned.com/2008/09/one-line-split-test-or-how-to-ab-all.html

5. The next feature fallacy:https://andrewchen.co/the-next-feature-fallacy-the-fallacy-that-the-next-new-feature-will-suddenly-make-people-use-your-product/

Tweet