A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. This is a great presentation and one that I'm going to point out to startup / early stage company CEOs. Normally, when I am talking to the founder of any startup trying to figure out what they need to do, one of the things I always try to do is understand their business at its core. In fact, this often becomes the mantra that we live by. Define what you need from a metrics In many cases, I can break it down into: Customer Acquisition Cost – how will you reach prospects, how will you convert them and how much will it cost to convert them Customer Lifetime Value – how much will you make off of each converted customer This very simple model works for a surprising number of business models.

I generally am working as an acting CTO for about 3-4 start-ups or other companies at any one time. Most often I'm being brought in the early stage, Start-up or Expansion (as the company looks at new product lines). My focus in this post is on the Early and Start-up stages - expansion is more of a consulting, focused project role and it acts different. I was just talking with someone who asked me to define how that could work and what they meant. Great question.

Give me granularity. If you’re a Web-based startup, for example, show me how many unique visitors you think you can get in the beginning, and what you’re using for an estimated conversion rate (buyers to browsers). And it’s surprising how few startup founders think in those terms. And it becomes really important to have that granularity really fast. I’ve talked before about initial conversations with founders and the questions I’m likely going to ask Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything . Tim Berry has a great post on Why I Hate Those Huge Market Numbers tells us that he doesn’t like to see business plans with multi-billion market numbers used as the basis for projections.

UPDATE:  I’m setting up a new project on analytics.  One of the things I am passionate about is analytics and metrics. It was this experience that gave me the appreciation for the importance of metrics and the greater importance of making meaning of the data for decision making. While at one of my recent startups I developed a framework for startup growth metrics If you are interested in collaborating ping me on twitter @gammill.  It promises to be fun and interesting. **************­**************­**************­**************­***********

TechCrunch Europe ran an article in November of last year that European startups need to work as hard as those in Silicon Valley and I echoed the sentiment in my post about the need for entrepreneurs to be maniacal about their businesses if one wants to work in the hyper competitive tech world. Mine started this way … TechCrunch ran my article yesterday as a guest post but I wanted to have a copy here for anybody who missed it and for future readers of this blog.  This This is a slightly longer version and also has an update at the end.

Heres 5 steps to start exploring: View Write me an e-mail and let me know what youre up to! The first 6 steps to homegrowing basic startup analytics Comments Quick intro to getting set up on analytics I’ve Futuristic Play by @Andrew_Chen Analysis on viral marketing, user experience, game design, and online ads As

I’ve worked with 30+ early-stage companies in all sorts of capacities (and spoken to many, many more), so I thought it might be worthwhile trying to classify the various ways that I’ve engaged in different technology roles in startups. Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. He posted on several social networking sites the following message: If you know of a startup company that could benefit from the knowledge, experience, professional

One of the things I am passionate about is analytics and metrics. It was this experience that gave me the appreciation for the importance of metrics and the greater importance of making meaning of the data for decision making. While at one of my recent startups I developed a framework for startup growth metrics (focused primarily on user metrics). I’m most interested in gathering a breadth and leveraging them to drive solid decision making. While at IBM I worked closely with a group of exceptionally talented researchers (marketing and technology)

Los Angeles-based Image Metrics (www.image-metrics.com) recently landed a $6.5M, Series B funding round for the firm's facial animation products. Mike Starkenburg: The company was founded in 2000, and was started in Manchester, UK, by a handful of computer vision specialists. How did a company started in the UK end up here? Mike We spoke with CEO Mike Starkenburg -- a former venture capitalist at the Sprout Group and longtime reader of our newsletter -- about the firm and its technology and how it's revolutionizing facial animation in both computer games and the movies. Tell

I recently got together with Aaron Shechet and an early stage startup to discuss the direction the company might want to take. It was a great conversation and I thought it would be a good idea to do some visible networking with Aaron to get to know him better. Tell me a bit about your background. I grew up in Los Angeles and went to undergrad at UC Santa Barbara, graduating in 2003 with Honors in Economics. While at UC Santa Barbara, I then went to Pepperdine University School of Law and graduated in 2006 with a Certificate from the Geoffrey H.