Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin
Ask HN: What are the most important business metrics for your startup?
8 points by shpxnvz on March 12, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 6 comments
I'm working on a business dashboard for small startups and mISVs, and could use some expert input.

What are the important business metrics you monitor every day? How do you monitor them?

Which are the most actionable vs. time consuming?



I sell iPhone apps.

Revenue is a poor metric - lag between actions and outcome is measured in weeks if not months. It's good to track over months, but does nothing in short term, so is not actionable.

I want to know what is the expected "time to stop using the app" at any given day. If this time is getting longer my app is getting better, so this gives me a metric that's better than revenue. However, this metric can only be accurately computed in retrospect, so I need to mine for correlations with something that's available sooner.

Something like "people who use the app on the first day 5 minutes are likely to drop out in two months, but people who use it on the first day for 20 minutes are likely to stay for 6 months".


On a social site: active users (defined as having visited the site in the past week).

ps: we are building a business dashboard soon, looked around and couldn't find anything. We'd want (for multiple products), on one page:

- traffic

- revenue

- new subscribers/members

with some kind of historic info, data coming in from analtyics and custom rss feeds or something


The two major ones that matter are:

Cost Per Acquisition and Average Revenue Per User.


Ideally the same metrics any small business uses:

-Revenue -Conversion Rate -Ad CTR -Time on site -Clickthroughs to order page -CPC/CPA -CLV


If you don't mind sharing, how do you get revenue numbers - analytics or payment processor?


Check your bank account?




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: