All Posts Tagged ‘Lean Startup’

Austin Gardner-Smith

Notes from a Lean Startup Case Study

Last week Cheryl and I did a quick case study about Pinyadda’s application of the lean startup mentality as part of the lean startup Boston meetup group. There’s a link to the video of the full presentation at the bottom of this post, but I thought I’d run through a couple of the key points  I tried to stress in talking about our experience that I think is worth saying again. But let me also be clear that these are my opinions and not necessarily part of the formal (or informal, for that matter) lean approach.

Being lean is about doing things that make sense and about being efficient, not necessarily about following every step of the ‘methodology’ to a T.

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Austin Gardner-Smith

Pirates Are Super Awesome, Metrics Are Kinda Cool, but Pirates+Metrics = Super Awesome Cool

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.

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Austin Gardner-Smith

KISSmetrics vs. Google Analytics

Like most other startups using the lean startup methodology, we’ve become pretty obsessed with tracking data. We track all kinds of stuff, from internal product metrics to external referrals to conversions via the various funnels we’ve set up. We rely on these numbers to help us make key product decisions, to tell us where we should focus our marketing efforts, and generally to find out what’s working and what’s not. For a company still wiggling our way into product/market fit, these numbers are our currency, and it’s important that we get them right.

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