Do More Faster: TechStars Lessons to Accelerate Your Startup

Chapter 32. Use Your Head, then Trust Your Gut

Ryan Mclntyre

Ryan was a co-founder of Excite.com and is currently a managing director at Foundry Group.

You can't manage what you don't measure. The importance of instrumenting your business properly to enable intelligent decision making cannot be overstated. This is particularly true for companies that run their businesses on the Web. A mountain of otherwise unavailable quantitative data is there for the taking. Every single user interaction can be measured and those data can be tremendously valuable when properly interpreted.

On the other hand, starting a company and creating a product that didn't previously exist in a market segment that may not have previously existed is a murky proposition at best. And there are often precious little data to go on in the earliest days of a company's life. And when available, the data are often confusing. Furthermore, a company's friends, mentors, advisors, and board members often give conflicting advice. Market research and user focus groups can yield inconsistent data and lead to conclusions that are in opposition to one another.

What is an early stage founder to do? Let me offer two bits of conflicting advice (get used to that!). First, be suspicious of your data. Consider everything that you hear, measure, and learn to be anecdotal even if it is corroborated by several sources. Second, especially ...