An introduction to startup analytics

One of the most requested topics when mentoring startups are analytics. Startup founders know that they have to measure things and that analytics are the solution, but not a lot of people know how to actually apply it. The problem is that even after reading the books (like Lean Analytics, which I can highly recommend), it is still hard to apply to your own startup. In the next blogposts we will try to explain analytics for startups in such a way that you can apply it to your own startup.

Analytics is the measurement of movement towards your business goals

Or to explain it in normal English, the basic question analytics answer is: “How are you doing”. When I started my first company in 2001, we had one metric that we were very proud of and showed prominently on the homepage:

1.346.505 profiles created. Something to be proud of right? Just like the second metric we had in our dashboard: 256.354.196.851 pageviews. Since… ever. But just like showing you have 39.576 downloads, those metrics are vanity metrics.

Vanity metrics have one goal and one goal only. They are meant to make you feel good. But…