If you are confused about where to start regarding your KPIs, this a speed summary and collection of data from sessions from YC, 500 Startups and Product School
2. INTRODUCTION
By Definition KPIs means Key Performance
indicators.
KPIs are values that show how a company or
business is progressing toward its goals and
objectives. They’re used to measure progress and
identify areas of your startup that need
improvement.
OR set of quantitative metrics that indicate how
healthy your business is doing.
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3. WHY DO WE NEED KPIS ?
Making sure of:
1. Delivering a real value.
2. Capturing recurring value.
3. Lagging indicator.
4. Generating usable feedback mechanism.
5. Keeping you grounded, humbled and realistic.
6. Finding Problems and being obsessive about the
obstacle.
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5. THE TWO ANCHORS OF KPIS
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Revenue Active Users
MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue) MAU (Monthly active users)
LTV (Lifetime value) DAU (Daily active users)
ARPU (average revenue per user) Customer Churn Rate
Revenue growth rate (M-O-M)
Revenue Churn Rate
6. WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY MEASURING ?
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Visits
Sign-ups
People who get value
Retention
Spread the product
Easy to understand
Easy to get started
People comeback
Growth
7. WHAT ARE WE ACTUALLY MEASURING ?
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• Fast initial growth.
• Time to sale.
• Organic VS paid.
• Exponential vs Linear.
“Growth Rate”
8. HOW TO MAKE THE BEST USE OF KPIS ?
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• Building something lots of people.
• prioritize what to do next and what needs to be fixed.
• Making sure moving fast don’t affect the business.
• Measuring and re-iterating every cohort (every week- every month- every quarter).
• Don’t count on free users' feedback (Their feedback is misleading regarding what to do
grow your revenues).
• Asking questions like (Do people bother to sign up ? Ratio of single page visits to multi-
page engagement ? How fast it takes to get started ?)
• Use it as a tool of communication between different departments, management and
investors.
“The enemy is back button” – Paul Graham
9. HOW TO MAKE THE BEST USE OF KPIS ?
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“Growth=Data Driven”
Have a north star metric and visit every 6 months.
Examples:
• Airbnb => Nights booked.
• UBER => Number of Trips.
• Amazon => GMV.
10. RETENTION AND CHURN
• Not paying attention makes most of your user base dies.
Good company means retained customers means the
company found repetitive working business model.
• Churn rate means that users are leaving your product or
service.
If you are losing 15% of your revenue every quarter that
means you are losing 60% of your potential or expected
revenue.
• Start from DAU (Daily active users) to MAU (Monthly
active users) in the very beginning, reducing the time
span increase your control and follow up.
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12. EASY VS HARD ACTIONS
• Easy actions:
1. Going from nothing to something (no
onboarding to onboarding- no
notification to notifications).
2. Focusing on that are already doing well
and bringing high-value AUs.
• Hard actions:
1. Reactivating dormant users.
2. Making your product awesome by
changing button color.
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13. KPIS TREE AND WHY YOU NEED ONE
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What is better ?
• Improve conversion by 0.5% or reduce customer contact rate by 10% ?
• Is 3X delivery worth 2X higher delivery fees?
14. KPI TREE AS A METRICS SYSTEM
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Why? How?
15. IT’S MAINLY A MATHEMATICAL RELATIONSHIP
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For more details on this check this
video: https://youtu.be/x2fjcabajao
16. TIPS AND TRICKS
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Be wary of learning specific lessons from different
companies (Souq case is different from Jumia case).
Don’t optimize what is going well.
Get ideas, test them, talk to others, listen to users
through direct feedback or behavior using your product.
Priotirize according to the stage (in the very beginning
you don’t need to think about fraud, spam or confirmation
emails for example).
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