Obsessing over the right metrics in the right order as your startup grows is key. Getting derailed by vanity metrics early on can lead you on a goose chase of frustration. This is a talk I gave for Startup Lisboa’s “Start to Table” program participants last week on how to tackle this important task. The talk begins at the 4:00 mark and ends at 43:00. If you play it at 2x chipmunk speed you can ingest the whole thing in 20min:

Here are the slides:

Here is the example funnel metrics Google Sheet referenced in the talk. If you have time this video from Y Combinator Startup School is a good primer to watch to set the stage on why this stuff is important before watching my talk on how to do it:

And for that matter if you’re doing a startup I recommend you join both of these free educational programs:

• Y Combinator Startup School is a comprehensive program from Silicon Valley’s most successful incubator. It has a ton of great content and instruction and is split into two tracks: one for founders actively building their startup and one for pre-startup founders who are planning to eventually leave a full-time job to pursue their venture.
• Steve Blank’s Udacity course on how to build a startup teaches the essence of the Customer Development process from Four Steps to The Epiphany as well as the Business Model Canvas for de-risking your model. You’ll learn how to get out of the building and conduct proper customer discovery and then systematically work through your BMC to arrive at a viable model.

Any questions feel free to post comments here. If you are a Startup Lisboa company I am the Entrepreneur in Residence for the rest of 2020 and you can ask internally for my booking link to schedule time with me.