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.

It was a great time to start a sports memorabilia company. We quickly built upon our meager initial capital by buying and selling cards that otherwise would likely have ended up in landfills. The advent of investors and grading services drove up the demand for near-perfect cards while suppressing the value of all other cards. In 1933, baseball card collectors were frustrated. For some reason, they found it impossible to complete their Goudy Gum 240-card set.

Last Friday, the LA CTO Forum hosted a discussion on the various metrics used to measure ourselves and our companies. found a bunch of old examples, sanitized them, and was struck by how much metrics evolve over the lifecycle of a company. was inspired enough to put together a diagram that describes how the metrics for a product or startup company evolve over time. I was asked to participate, and eagerly dug into my archives.