Do More Faster India, 2nd Edition

Chapter 51Obsess over Metrics

Dave McClure

Dave is an angel investor and has been geeking out in Silicon Valley for almost 20 years as a software developer, entrepreneur, startup advisor, blogger, and Internet marketing nerd. He’s been a Techstars mentor since 2007.

The ability to get real-time data and feedback is unique to the Internet. If you’re smart, you can take advantage of that and build better products by collecting real-time usage metrics and by making decisions based on measured user data.

Today, you are probably building too much stuff and you are also probably measuring too much stuff. Contrary to popular belief, engineering is generally not the most important thing in an Internet business. You’ve probably engineered too much already and there are probably features that you should remove from your product. What’s really hard is simplifying your product and building a great user experience.

It’s important to start by building a culture of feedback and measured analytics into your process and your organization. The reason for this is that startup success often boils down to your ability to do two things: make money and make users happy. If you can figure out how to do both of those things at scale, then you probably have an interesting business on your hands. Luckily, you can tell if users are happy or not by measuring their behavior.

There are five key metrics to measuring user behavior and happiness:

1. Acquisition—How are users coming to your site through various ...