Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 37Use Your Head, then Trust Your Gut

Ryan McIntyre

Ryan was a cofounder of Excite and is currently a partner at Foundry Group.

You can’t manage what you don’t measure. I can’t overstate how important it is to have metrics on your business so that you can make intelligent decisions. Metrics are particularly important for companies that run their businesses on the Web and a mountain of otherwise unavailable data is there for the taking. Every single user interaction can be measured, categorized, and analyzed, providing tremendous value if you can properly interpret what you’re seeing.

On the other hand, it’s incredibly difficult to start a company and create a product that never existed and try to sell it in a market segment that also never existed. And, unfortunately, there are often precious little data to go on in the earliest days of a company’s life. Even when data is available, it’s often confusing. To make matters worse, a company’s friends, mentors, advisors, and board members will give you 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 early on, remember to gather as much data as possible and ...