I like pirates. A lot. I’m from a place where people spend a lot of time on boats and we played Coasties and Pirates instead of Cowboys and Indians. So when I first heard about this dude named Dave McClure who was spreading something called  ”Startup Metrics for Pirates” I was pumped.

Turns out this stuff is useful for people who are pirate-neutral, maybe even those with an aversion to pirates (I don’t understand you). I could sum it up  but you’re much better off checking out the presentation or watching a video of Dave giving the basic talk. But the gist is pretty simple: measure the stuff that matters, don’t measure the stuff that doesn’t. This might seem like an easy thing to do, but in reality it can be pretty easy to confuse getting a lot numbers with getting the right numbers.

We’ve measured a whole bunch of stuff over the course of our time at Pinyadda, and we’re still zeroing in on exactly what we need and what the best ways are to quantify those metrics. What works for our business almost certainly won’t work for yours or anyone else’s, and it takes time to figure out the magic concoction that can quickly and easily provide accurate insight into what’s really going on.

In our current phase, we’re focusing on two key aspects of the AARRR model – Activation and Retention. At the moment, these are the two most important things that we need to figure out: how and when are people getting to the ‘aha’ moment with Pinyadda, and what keeps them coming back? By drilling down and taking a really close look at these specific aspects of our product over the last month, we’ve been able to do a couple of key things that have kept us focused on making the right product iterations instead of spreading feature lists all over the whiteboards and then spinning around in tight circles:

1) We asked some really specific but straightforward questions about how people were using our product. These are things like “how many people does someone need to follow before they start Pinning articles consistently,” and “of the people who login most, do they follow more people, sites, or topics?” We’ve had this data all along but we’d always cast it in terms of feature use or product analysis. Spinning the questions this way, to make them centered on the people instead of the product, makes the information more useful, easier to understand and much more actionable.

2) We invested a small but invaluable amount of time in building some reporting features for ourselves. Raw data is wonderful and we have lots of it, but if it takes an hour harvest and organize it’s not really useful to us on the daily. Taking hours away from pure product development to work on this is a little hard to swallow, but sacrificing a few Friday nights to do it might save weeks of wasted effort later if you can avoid building a single doomed feature. Plus, it’s a good environment to mess around with some new toys (I used a lot of CSS3, which I don’t use much in production, and also got comfortable with a great visualization library called Flot). Here’s a sneak peak:

3) We set some tangible goals for user activity and retention. We’ve always done goal setting but narrowing the focus has helped everyone on the team look at their area of focus from a common perspective. When you’re as small as we are it can be hard not to get lost in your own little corner. Keeping our eyes on a small and focused goal set makes it easier to stay on the same page. The results have been great and it’s been awesome to feel the team catch its collective stride.

McClure’s language may be a bit blue, but the message should be taken to heart by small teams everywhere. It’s helped us not because we follow it to a T or take every word as truth, but because it just makes sense. Every business will have to find its own way, and what makes sense to measure will vary widely. But by thinking critically about metrics before spewing numbers all over the place, coloring the things you measure in terms of people and not faceless features, and keeping team members aligned toward small but focused tasks, you can channel the spirit of pirates and strive forward in the search for internet booty.

Tags: customer, customer development, Design, Lean Startup, Product, Startups, strategy

This entry was posted on Monday, March 22nd, 2010 at 4:16 pm and is filed under Product. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.