Andrew Chen over at Futuristic play, wrote a great post on the importance of analytics, but also the balancing act of deciding what to track and how much time to spend on it.

With our portfolio companies, and startups in general, metrics are key to measuring your business performance and help to guide the company.

Andrew reminded me of the following key points:

• Some reports are operational. Some are investigative. But these are two distinct outlets.
• Be mindful of the engineering resources and opportunity cost of developing analytics tools and reports.
• Also be mindful of the valuable output these reports produce, which may prevent wasted development / false starts.
• Most importantly,If you’re not going to do something about it, it may not be worth measuring.

I’m guilty of overlooking these points from time to time, but will be more mindful going forward.

Have a read: omg I’m just a startup, I can’t do those fancy analytics!

Trackback URI | Comments RSS