Yesterday we had the first introductory session with a potential portfolio company and tried once again to explain why it is so important to focus first on a clear early adopter. We often compare the early adopter with a person who fell of his bike (we’re from Amsterdam after all) and broke his arm. His […]
Learn how to run successful lean startup experiments and get inspired by reading about the most used experiments used by startups.
In the first 5 blog posts about Analytics we covered Vanity Metrics, the Pirate Metrics framework, the criteria of a good metric, the key activity, the key metric and cohorts. The final problem we need to overcome is one we wrote about in almost all the previous blogposts: The danger of having metrics that make […]
This is Part 4 of our Lean Startup series. One of the most important tools or experiments you can do throughout the search for your business model is the customer interview. Whether you are finding out if there is a problem, or want to know about what it really is that people are trying to […]
When I first started using good metrics (I was no longer focussing on vanity metrics like total registered users) I had a hard time wrapping my head around Retention. What does it mean when you have 25% active users. Do they come back every day? Or every week? How do you measure that 25%? It […]
In the last post, I talked about the importance of validated learning. Trying to validate your way to a working business model. You don’t validate your business model by running one single experiment. Continuously testing risky assumptions is important in every phase of your startup. Helping you to de-risk the path to a successful business […]
If there is one thing important for startups, it is focus. The same applies to analytics. Startup life is chaotic enough and you can not have an overview of everything at the same time. To effectively apply analytics to your startup, it is important to focus on one metric at a time. We are basically […]
In the previous post, I introduced the lean startup methodology by Eric Ries. He defines two phases in a startup. There is a Customer Discovery and Customer Validation phase. The first phase is all about proving the problem/solution fit. It starts off with exploring the customer segments, validating there is a real problem and deciding […]
In the previous two posts we gave you an introduction to analytics, discussed vanity metrics and the criteria for good metrics. In this post we’d like to introduce the Pirate Metrics, an analytics framework created by Dave McClure of 500 startups. It’s called Pirate Metrics not just because Dave McClure seems to be a big […]
The Lean Startup, Running lean, The four steps to epiphany, we have all read the books. We use the Business Model Canvas and build MVP’s. The Lean Startup methodology has become very popular not only within the startup industry worldwide, but also amongst companies that want to enable innovation and change. Allocating time and money […]
Last time we did a short introduction on analytics. We explained that numbers that can only go up and to the right are called vanity metrics. Metrics that only exist make you feel good. For example, the total amount of signups since the beginning of your startup is a vanity metric. In this blogpost we […]
One of the most requested topics when mentoring startups are analytics. Startup founders know that they have to measure things and that analytics are the solution, but not a lot of people know how to actually apply it. The problem is that even after reading the books (like Lean Analytics, which I can highly recommend), it is still hard to apply to your own startup.