Managing Startups: Best Blog Posts

Chapter 3. How Many Metrics Do You Need to Run Your Startup?

Ben Yoskovitz

Answer: only one.

One of the concepts we’re pushing hard in the Lean Analytics book is the One Metric That Matters (OMTM).

The idea is this: at any given time in your business there’s one key metric you should be focusing on. Not two, or three, or four. Just one. And that one metric becomes the driving force for what you do, experiments you run, and decision making.

Picking the metric is hard. Drawing a line in the sand for your goals with the metric is even harder. But these are both important for achieving the levels of focus and speed required to succeed.

At GoInstant we’ve been very analytical. We measure lots of different things, from overall usage, to specific feature success, to performance and scalability. But none of these are the One Metric That Matters. We’re still working on how to define our OMTM, but ultimately GoInstant will be a huge success when most of the Web is co-browsable “out-of-the-box.” That will mean more customers can get up and running with GoInstant more quickly. Everything we do has to make more of the Web and more of the elements of websites and web applications co-browsable. It’s a huge challenge.

So GoInstant’s OMTM, which is still a work in progress, is essentially a percentage of the Web that is co-browsable. Measuring that is tricky. There are lots of variables. We clearly can’t test the entire Web. Nor is that really necessary. So we’re building systems ...