article thumbnail

Why Misunderstanding Startup Metrics Can Cost You Your Business

Both Sides of the Table

There has been a lot of public debate over the past several weeks about whether it’s a good thing to be “gross margin positive” or not and commentary always reminds me that some people at startups don’t quite understand financial metrics or even how to think about which ones are healthy. And of course ultimately on profitability.

Metrics 150
article thumbnail

How Startups Can Use Metrics to Drive Success

Both Sides of the Table

Having a set of metrics that you watch & that you feel are the key drivers of your success helps keep clarity. And the more public you can make your goals for these key metrics the better. You will likely have multiple sets of metrics you keep depending on the company’s stage, one’s function in the company and level.

Metrics 346
Insiders

Sign Up for our Newsletter

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

article thumbnail

The Expert Guide to Creating a Marketing Growth Strategy

ConversionXL

A common framework for defining your growth model is Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics for startups : the AARRR framework. For each stage of the funnel, consider the distinct metrics that ladder up to your business’s KPIs. This exercise will lead you to a full picture of the channels you can leverage to increase those metrics.

Marketing 115
article thumbnail

Lessons Learned: The three drivers of growth for your business.

Startup Lessons Learned

Master of 500 Hats: Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp 2008, London) This presentation should be required reading for anyone creating a startup with an online service component. He also has a discussion of how your choice of business model determines which of these metric areas you want to focus on. Choose one.

article thumbnail

How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

The metrics were good but we wondered how much better they would be when we expanded our product. That marketing can be PR or SEO or influencer distribution or other forms of “unpaid” marketing. PR requires time and effort from your team that isn’t spent elsewhere and thus is a real cost.

Startup 150
article thumbnail

Startup Killer: the Cost of Customer Acquisition | For Entrepreneurs

www.forentrepreneurs.com

Business model viability, in the majority of startups, will come down to balancing two variables: Cost to Acquire Customers (CAC) The ability to monetize those customers, or LTV (which stands for Lifetime Value of a Customer) Successful web businesses have long understood these metrics as they have such an easy way to measure them.

article thumbnail

SuperMac War Story 9: Sales, Not Awards « Steve Blank

Steve Blank

And the final lesson was that we were keeping score on our packaging with the wrong metrics – it wasn’t about awards, it was about sales in the retail channel. Hopefully you and your co-founders are experts in one or two parts (agile development, SEO/SEM, etc.) After that you’ve become a battle-hardened realist.

Sales 120