The other day I tweeted, “Every critical metric at a company needs a counter-metric to prevent the wrong kind of optimization.” It got a reaction and I thought to expand on the topic. Have you seen any of these examples of metrics + reward systems gone awry? The marketing and demandgen teams are tasked with bringing on leads, so they …
People love metrics. I love metrics. I love getting arguments out of opinion and into data. However, I’m also deeply suspicious of metrics, especially since I focus on new products and thus live in a world of constant change and evolution. Some points of discussion: New Employees I have new employees join and ask “what targets do I need to …
Matt Meeker, co-founder of Meetup and now with Polaris running Dogpatch NYC, gave a Skillshare class tonight on metrics. He stressed the need to combine and balance quantitative data, qualitative sources and entrepreneurial gut/judgement. My favorite tidbit came when he was discussing how to prioritize your top metrics. His advice for picking your “driving metric”, as he called it, was …
Back in November, I wrote about financial modeling and wanted to pick up the topic again. I think this is very important for lean startups. A financial model focuses your brain on key goals and assumptions. It’s great to obsess over product-market fit, but you also need to take the time to make sure your economics are reasonable as well. …
Mark Suster of GRP just wrote a post on the importance of financial models, and in an effort to be helpful to new entrepreneurs finding their way around Excel, I thought I would post a business model Excel template for anyone to download and customize (bottom of post). I completely agree with Suster. The one time I told myself “I …
While the sales of new games in retail have struggled recently, Gamasutra recently reported that the digital download services continue to see strong growth: Valve’s Steam service revealed a 97% increase in download sales, year-over-year IGN’s own direct download service, Direct2Drive, has also surged year on year, according to the company, posting gains of 56% compared to twelve months previously. …
There have been a lot of posts around lately about whether blogging is dead, because short form is the new shiny. Of course, new media types never kill off old media types (or at least not quickly), but the topic is really moot because long form and short form are apples and oranges — two different value propositions. One thing …
Conventional wisdom is that in down economies, entertainment is counter-cyclical. In the console space, the sales of new games has come under pressure in the poor economy, but the sales of used games is way up as well as subscriptions to mail-based video game rental programs (see Nielsen report). Now Comscore has tallied up US visitors to online gaming sites …
Justin Smith had an interesting slide deck at the Social Games Summit where he shared his estimates for monthly ARPUs (average revenue per user): “good Facebook” – $0.30 – $0.40 “good MySpace” – $0.60 – $0.70 Some games can do much better. The Facebook game Battlestations shared some data in late 2008 where they appeared to have around a $1.00 …