Pick One Metric And Let Everything Else Slide - 11/5

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📰 Today's Edition: Pick One Metric And Let Everything Else Slide

Focus is the #1 thing at an early-stage startup.

You have almost no people and almost no money. That means very little time and cash for anything. Every hour spent on the wrong thing is gone for good.

Everyone agrees with this. Then they go back to a to-do list with 40 items on it, and every single one looks mandatory.

Everything looks mandatory

Running a startup creates an endless supply of "must-do" tasks.

Incorporation. Legal. Accounting. Marketing. Product. Engineering. Hiring. The bank account that won't open. The contractor invoice. The investor who wants an updated deck.

You will never get it all done.

The trap is treating the list like a queue. You chip away at 15 things. None of them go far enough to matter. Poof, the month is gone.

Pick one number

The best fix we've found is One Metric That Matters (OMTM). We found it running our own companies and riding in the back seat of hundreds of portfolio companies.

It comes from the lean startup and lean analytics crowd: Eric Ries, Alistair Croll and Ben Yoskovitz. The whole idea fits on a sticky note. Pick one metric. Move it. More or less ignore everything else. Line up the whole company behind it.

Say this month it's signups. You get 100 a month. You want 1,000. That number is now everyone's job.

Marketing builds landing pages and runs ads to get signups. Engineering fixes onboarding so new signups actually finish, or ships referral links so customers bring in new ones. Whoever does support digs through conversations to find out why people bail halfway.

Now the usual version. Marketing is doing a rebrand. Engineering is refactoring billing. Someone is three weeks into picking a new CRM. All reasonable. None of it moves the number.

Switch when the problem moves

Change the metric when it stops being the problem.

Say signups go great. Next month you look up and users are churning like crazy. The bottleneck moved, so the metric moves too. Now it's retention, and the whole team points at a retention goal.

Each month, find the single biggest thing holding the business back. Throw everything at it until it stops holding you back.

A rough rhythm: pick the metric, commit for a month, then ask honestly if it's still the bottleneck. Some metrics need two or three months. Very few deserve six.

To pick one, ask: which number, if it doubled, would change your situation the most?

• Nobody can find your product? Traffic or signups.

• People show up and leave? Activation or retention.

• They stay but don't pay? Conversion.

• They pay once and vanish? Churn.

First, pick something you can move with the people and money you have. If a metric only goes up with a team of 15, it's not your metric this month. Second, pick something you can't game. Signups bought with a giveaway will hit the number while the business gets worse. They teach you nothing.

Let the rest slide

Some of it gets done badly. Some of it doesn't get done at all.

Legal, accounting and admin have a floor. Stay incorporated. Stay compliant. Pay your people.

Below that floor is a big pile of work that feels urgent and isn't. The rebrand can wait. The perfect analytics setup can wait. The partnership talk that's gone nowhere for two months can wait. Probably forever.

What you get back is concentration. All your tiny resources land on one thing, so the effect is big enough to see. Spread them across eight projects and each one gets a nudge too small to measure. Also, nobody on your team knows what to do on Monday without asking you.

How unfocused startups die

They run out of money and morale at the same time.

The team works hard for a year on lots of small things. None get pushed far enough to work. Nobody can point to a number that clearly went up. The founders are exhausted. The investors see a flat chart. The bank balance speaks for itself.

Nobody was lazy. They just never pushed anything far enough to find out if it worked.

This will feel uncomfortable, but when in doubt, cut more.

Until next time,

Dunky, the "one metric at a time" hippocorn

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