Customer Engagement.

Today, we’re covering the basics of customer engagement.

1. Metrics — You should pick an engagement metric early in your startup’s life, and you need to set a high standard. Monthly active users will not suffice. You need to hold yourself accountable to a more rigorous metric.

2. Tooling — Invest the time necessary to ensure accurate and timely tracking of your chosen engagement metric. This doesn’t have to involve expensive cloud software, e.g., Metabase works well and is free!

3. Prioritize Engagement Over Features — Instead of becoming preoccupied with releasing a continuous stream of new features, focus your company’s attention on improving the engagement metric. This usually means prioritizing bug fixes over new product launches.

If you can drive meaningful customer engagement, growth becomes quite easy, as your customers will love talking about your service.

Best of luck out there.

Today we’re discussing the process of selecting metrics for your startup.

1. Keep it simple.
Aim for no more than 4 key metrics. For most companies, anything more is just wallpaper. The metrics you choose should focus on: distribution, engagement, revenue, and churn.

2. Pick challenging metrics.
Make sure your metrics hold your company accountable from the start. “Monthly Active Users” is useless compared to “Daily Active Users”, or tracking users who engage with your service at least 5 days a week.

3. Build consensus.
Your team will need to focus on and optimize your chosen metrics, so it’s best to gather feedback and input before making the final decision on which metrics to monitor.

Best of luck out there.

Today we’re talking about the different tools founders can use to track their startup’s metrics.

1. SaaS services.
Most startups opt for online SaaS tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, or Google Analytics. These tools are either free but quite limited, or they end up being very costly as you grow. So a common choice, but I don’t recommend them.

2. Open source.
Open-source solutions like Metabase are a good alternative but require dedicated servers, which means additional setup work, ongoing maintenance, and some costs.

3. Trust.
Your metrics do not need to be real-time, but they should be accurate. Aim for daily updates at first and invest engineering resources to ensure the data’s reliability.

Best of luck out there.

Today we’re talking about the importance of prioritizing customer engagement over building new features.

1. It’s very tempting to constantly build and ship new features, as that’s exciting work. However, your customers care about a seamless experience. Fixing bugs and improving existing features might be less glamorous, but it will make your customers happy, and they will use your product more.

2. Introducing more features makes your product more complex. But the most beloved products are often the simplest, so it’s usually better to focus on one feature that truly shines.

3. Lastly, there are plenty of successful examples of this approach: Instagram took years to launch video, even when other apps were growing with this feature. The same for Spotify and podcasts. Yet these apps enjoyed great engagement because of their core feature’s popularity — there was no need to rush on new features.

Best of luck out there.