It’s one of the chief challenges we face as we build our ideas into businesses – how do we drown out the noise to focus on signals – to make business decisions and create products that, in a sense, are so irresistible that they sell themselves?
For start-ups, that’s a proposition complicated by the pressure to show traction and gain a foothold, before we slump into irrelevance. As such, we can have a tendency to make business decisions on how to further develop and roll out packaged software based on metrics like downloads, registered users and raw page views, numbers that present a flash of the growth potential we believe to be huge. But recent history (which in our space could be defined as the span of a week) is littered with promising ideas that failed to matrix with the insight necessary to fuel sustainable growth. I think it’s a failure due in part to the overreliance on these so-called vanity metrics, numbers that give us a pretty good idea about whether we have a good idea, but can’t provide any direction on how to execute it.
How can we gain insight into what helps us improve the experience that customers have with our desktop applications, boosts engagement, and allow us to meet our business goals? Let’s look at some things we can measure that help us make insight-driven business decisions….
