Reading List: Picking & Using Metrics
A curated lists of our favorite posts for defining, tracking, and distributing the data most vital to your company.
From the Visible Foreword:
- The Critical Thing Most Startups Seem to Forget - Tim Mullen of St Aloüarn Investments discusses why finance is often overlooked by early stage companies.
- Why a SaaS Customer Hasn't Churned When They Cancel - Andrew Tate of Profitwell discusses the huge opportunity that most companies are missing out on between cancellation and churn.
- Three Metrics to Measure Sales and Marketing Alignment & Improve Organizational Transparency - Christine Crandell, President of New Business Strategies, stresses the importance of the CEO when it comes to aligning sales and marketing and shares 3 alignment KPIs to track.
- How to Prove Your Market is Big Enough to VCs - Rob Go of NextView Ventures discusses how founders can navigate the second most common reason VCs turn down a deal; the size of the addressable market.
- Why We Choose Profit - Jason Fried, Founder & CEO at Basecamp, takes a deep dive into the decision to become profitable as quick as possible at Basecamp.
- How to Prep Your Financial Info for Investors - The team at Lighter Capital lays out the basic financials investors expect to see from prospective and current investments.
- Top 6 Financial Mistakes to Avoid for Early, Mid and Late-Stage Companies - The Team at Lighter Capital shares the 6 largest financial mistakes they see companies make at different stages.
- An Ode to The OKR - How to Motivate Greater Ambition in Teams - Tomasz Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures shares his experience with OKRs and why they are a great leading indicator of success, discipline and ambition.
The Archives:
- Tomasz Tunguz from Redpoint Ventures has a great post about Your Startups’s 10 Most Important Metrics.
- Andreessen Horowitz leads the charge in standardizing startup metrics in response to confusion in the market with their post on 16 Startup Metrics.
- Ben Yoskovitz, the co-author or Lean Metrics wrote Measuring What Matters:How To Pick a Good Metric.
- Alida Miranda-Wolff and Pete Wilkins of Hyde Park Angels lay out the most important growth, usage and customer metrics to investors.
- You are generating a ton of data every day with all of your actions. Angela Tran Kingyens of Version One Ventures provides some insight on how to make sense of that data and use it to fuel your growth.
- Bill Gurley of Benchmark revisits his thoughts on why conversion is the most important internet metric of all.
- According to Tomas Tunguz, the name of the game in 2016 is Unit Economics.