A post by Fred Wilson pointed me to Dave McClure's Startup Metrics presentation. In fact, this often becomes the mantra that we live by. Define what you need from a metrics and reporting standpoint. Quite often the goal is to get them into an excel spreadsheet in a form that allows people to easily play with them. Startup Metrics for Pirates (SeedCamp, Sept 2009) View more documents from Dave McClure . What Dave McClure's presentation does is point to 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.

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’s the old – 5% of massive market gives us a big number. Part of those questions are around Startup Metrics . This aligns with understanding the the core business model: I agree completely: If it makes you feel better to give me that number in passing, okay, go ahead, but don’t put any emphasis on it. Instead, give me the details on how you’re going to make your

One of the things I am passionate about is analytics and metrics. While at IBM I worked closely with a group of exceptionally talented researchers (marketing and technology) to develop a host of models used to drive broad reaching strategy decisions. 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. UPDATE:  I’m setting up a new project on analytics.  If you are interested in collaborating ping me on twitter @gammill. 

Then, I Review existing materials Business Plan Marketing Plan Marketing Materials Product Plan / Roadmap Current and Projected Financials Business Pipeline Team Member Bios / Resumes Current Metrics Roadmap Normally there are crude documents for each of these areas that can be quickly read / scanned. Conduct meetings to ensure understanding and alignment around market opportunities, business model, sources of revenue, immediate needs, growth, product opportunities, and ultimately to establish business and product priorities. I generally am working as an acting CTO for about 3-4 start-ups or other companies at any one time.

He has over eight years’ experience in Internet Marketing Strategy. 1) Conversion rate is the single most important metric. From Affiliate Marketing Alliance : States are attempting to define their resident affiliates as having a sales presence for out-of-state merchants. What’s the biggest metric for affiliate programs and how understanding it can get you more customers Have you noticed that affiliate programs don’t make it to the cover magazines like BusinessWeek or Wired? Maybe it’s because affiliate programs aren’t as cool as social networks or

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.

Administrators? How will you be taking this to market? SEO for Startups )? What are your key Startup Metrics ? This discussion always is at a pretty high level in initial conversations and then drills down from there. Yes, a lot of these questions are partially answered in a business plan / presentation deck / marketing plan. We’ll spend quite a bit of time I just had an all-too common conversation with the founder of a startup who had spent more than a year working with a software development company who had produced a mess. The mess really comes from

Most often at the earliest point in the life of a startup, the dominant need is certainly to produce product to get something in the market, get funding, etc. What makes the most sense for us? Given likely market changes, how will we design and build so that the systems can respond to marketplace changes? How do we need to structure the systems to get ahead and stay ahead of the competition? What are the biggest areas of technical risk? I’ve been having discussions with several people recently about the role of the CTO (Chief Technology Officer) in very early stage companies.

The goal of marketers is usually to increase revenue, so we create metrics that help us do that. Metrics are those numbers that "per" -- like "cost per lead" and "page views per day." Marketing Metrics Are Everywhere There There We strive for increasing our clickthrough rate on e-mails, newsletters, banner ads, paid search ads, and wherever we can measure clicks. We look for ways to increase the "open rate" for everything from e-mails and envelopes to prospects' minds. Why?

One of the things I am passionate about is analytics and metrics. While at IBM I worked closely with a group of exceptionally talented researchers (marketing and technology) to develop a host of models used to drive broad reaching strategy decisions. 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. I’m most interested in gathering a breadth and leveraging them to drive solid decision making. One of those models was a cool Structural Equation Model used