Death by dashboard

I happen to be on the board of a handful of early-stage companies. ‘Startup-ing’ is a contact sport and we need effective ways of keeping score. Broadly speaking, keeping score comes in two flavours: financial and operational reporting. I work mostly in the SaaS space, where companies have endless amounts of data and much of it ends up in dashboards.

These operational dashboards tell us many things that are useful, like: how many customers we have; how many users they have; how long they have been with us; how much revenue we make from each one and so on. Sometimes, we even know which buttons they clicked and how long it took them to move from screen A to screen B.

Companies – big, small and in-between – use data, and targets anchored on this data (KPIs, OKRs and so on) to provide clarity and alignment. Keeping score is an objective, widely understood practice that makes it easier to set goals and assess if we’re making progress against them, which is the very job of the directors.

‍

Building your focus muscle

Because we have so much data, and so many dimensions of data, it’s often difficult to improve the metrics across all of these dimensions. Do we want more customers? Do we want more profitable customers? Do we want more profitable customers with more users?  In practice, you cannot improve on all elements of your performance, measured through metrics, at once.

Regardless of how early you are in your startup journey, I recommend you narrow the focus.  That means allocating significant resources to a narrow set of performance factors – maybe one or two, but not a handful. You can do this for a sprint, a month, a quarter or a year, depending on what’s important to you and your plans. Despite the portrayal of startups as intense and chaotic, it’s never too early to build the focus muscle.

Sports provide a good analogy in this context. Take soccer or ‘fútbol’ to me. In every game, the score is the ultimate measure of success. Determinants of winning will be metrics like shots on goal, possession ratios, pass accuracy rate and so on. To get better you must improve on all counts, but you can only focus (and improve) on one element at a time.

Humans are human too

But what often gets lost in the dashboards and spreadsheets is the ‘human’ perspective. All of the buyers (and most of the users) of our products happen to be mammals. Yes, they are!

Those who work with me extensively know I often ask something like ‘who are our wildly successful customers?’

What I’m trying to understand is less about how many times they logged into our product, or how quickly they purchased it, but rather:

• Do our most successful customers have common demographic and business attributes, such as size, income, profession and life stage?
• Do our biggest advocates praise us on specific aspects of our product or their experience with us, which is not true for others?
• Are the customers who pay us the most deriving economic (or other) value from us in a way that’s different from other customers?

In other words, can we easily anticipate who will be most successful with our product and proposition? If you deeply understand the answers to these questions, you’re likely well on your way to building a compelling business.

‍

Obsess over your ideal customer

If I had just one piece of advice for anyone startup-ing or who is generally early in their journey, it would be to obsess over their ideal customer or ideal customer profile (ICP).

To build a successful startup, your universe does not have to be that large, especially if your proposition has global appeal. A lucid ICP makes it easier to target specific segments, simplifies your messaging and accelerates all stages in your sales cycle. And you keep your customers happier and for longer, which also means your costs are lower.

And keep talking about your ideal customers all the time: when you make a sale, lose a deal, employ someone, or pitch for money.  

It turns out that numbers are relatively easy to insert into a board pack or spreadsheet and, conventionally, the way we keep score in business. My plea is that you put equivalent effort into surfacing your wildly successful customers to the stakeholders around you. Life is that much richer – and business more successful – when we consider and celebrate the human angle.

‍