anders.tyckr.com

I don't mean that you just got to love them. You actually have to love them and here's why:

There is a reason why the economic downturn has not affected internet startups in the same way as traditional businesses. The internet just passed 1 billion users and bandwidths are continuously increasing at the same time as online advertising and e-commerce is still growing strong. Simply put, the overall market is getting much bigger. Launching a new internet service today is so cheap and easy that it can be done literally for free and in just 24 hours. But putting together a product in as short time as that puts even more focus on measuring what the users actually are doing with the product. You will probably have one idea, but your users might have another. Through simple real time tracking of defined user metrics it is much easier today to make rational decisions based on actual user behavior.

After seeing a presentation by Dave McClure at Seedcamp this fall I got really interested in metrics for startups. According to Dave there are five different areas that are important to measure when it comes to a new internet service or product. In this post I will try to go through and give tips on how they apply to your business. The five areas are:

• Acquisition
• Activation
• Retention
• Referral
• Revenue

Acquisition

This one is quite basic when you first look at it. Let's face it, if you have a website you'll want users coming to your site. But how should you measure the differant ways you get them. The first single most important thing is also the most obvious. You should have a killer app. Focus on creating a service with one really crisp functional feature that works really good that your users love. But before we go into that let's focus on the acquisition metrics. Try and find your different marketing channels may it be SEO, SEM, PR, Facebook, Email, Widgets or campaigns. Measure volume, cost per acquisition, and best performing conversion. Find your top 10-100 keywords that you should buy adwords for and use Google Analytics extensively. Set up goals and look closely at clicks vs. CPC vs. conversions of each goal.

Activation

Once you have your users coming to your site you need to get them to do something there. This has to do a lot with clear communication of what they can expect to do at your site. Here you need to measure any type of activation that seems logical for you, but keep the different metrics low in the numbers. Things to measure could be, clicks on links, sign ups, low bounce rate, pages per visit, and even mouse movement or eye tracking. Concrete tips on improving these metrics could be A/B testing which you can do with Google Website Optimizer, experiment with many different landing pages, and literally watching over the shoulder of a user when they enter the site. A great tool for this that I recently ran into was UserFly where you can record and playback the users' sessions with mousemovements and clicks and everything you need. Crazy Egg is another good resource for heat maps of user clicks. The best way to start is to make a lot of dumb guesses of what might work and then iterate really fast on those that work.

It just struck me that you might be able to apply genetic programming techniques for the A/B testing. Create 20 different versions of a landing page. Then take the best performing 2 and combine them into 15 new versions that are similar to them, then create 5 that are based on them but include some sort of mutation. Do this for a couple of generations and you'll probably have a pretty good view of what works or not.

Retention

How do you make your users come back to your site over and over again? Even if I usually don't like when services sends me emails, it is still working because I go back to their site. Take facebook for instance. I get maybe 10 facebook mails per day which takes me back to the site because there is something I'm interested in there. Automated email marketing and alerts should not be underestimated. The only really important thing here is to make it easy for the users to unsubscribe. Emails could be sent quite often in some cases, but in others it only makes sense each month. Subjects could be the status of a user's account, best of lists, or interesting news where something has changed. Just remember to keep 80% of the message in the subject line, and 20% in the body text. Other than email, blogging and news feeds are crucial to keeping your users incentive to come back high.

Key metrics here are to measure the distribution of visits over time. That is how many times a visitor comes back over a period of time and how fast the decay of visits is. This will show you how a full customer life cycle and measure its effectiveness. When it comes to email and news feeds, it is important to measure how many people actually open the email. You can do this by including server loading html or tracking images. You should measure the CTR and the total number of users coming to you through your emails. This can be done with for instance campaignmonitor.com. Relevant levels for this is of course dependent on your site and users, but goals could be 20% open rate with 2% CTR. You should use this tracking to try and identify you fanatical users that will actively promote your service. These are the users that can get virality going and you should pay close attention to them. With Google Analytics you can easily measure visitor loyalty and session length as well as conversions once you've set up your goals from landing pages.

Referral

Once you've found your fanatics and cheerleaders you need to have tools that allow them to easily refer their friends and followers to your site after they've had a happy experience visiting. This can be done with simple social "share this" buttons, or widgets that can be embedded on other sites and blogs. There is a really simple formula for measuring the Viral Growth Factor.

X * Y * Z

• X = % of users who invite other people
• Y = average # of people that they invited
• Z = % of users who accepted an invitation

A viral growth factor that is > 1 means that your organic growth of users is exponential.

And finally Revenue

This part is where the general tips stop to be important and you have to look at the combination of all of your other metrics to figure out what each new user is worth with your business model may it be AdSense, Freemium, Subscription, or Lead generation. For tips on business models you can have a look at The Business Model DataBase. There is a reason why this is the last area of measurement. It might be wrong to start with the revenue model when you develop your new service. Don't let that hinder your progress in acquireing, activating and retaining users. It doesn't matter if you have the best most innovative business model in the world, if you don't have any visitors.

Keep your costs low, focus your development 80% of improving existing features and 20% on new features, all based on your super detailed metrics. And to cite Dave McClure:

Features don't matter... Usability + [Measured] Conversion Matters

Currently, I'm working on my 24hbc project rmindr.com and I know that even if I've launched an early alpha version to the public, it is far from ready, since I can't use it the way I want to yet.

My whole purpose for creating a GTD tool was that I felt a need for this type of service my self. Other services like Remember The Milk and just didn't do it for me. My main inspiration has been the excellent program Things which is perfect and do it just right, with a few things (no pun indended) that I'm missing.

The most important step for Getting Things Done is that there is absolutely no friction when collecting an idea. There is a reason why most computer geeks still have a pen and paper right next to their computer as it is a really fast way to get stuff out of your head. My approach to solving this problem is to offer as many fast and simple methods as possible for collecting ideas. I started implementing the one I thought was most useful - collecting by SMS, since I've at times been sending an SMS to my self to remind me of something.

The problem in everyday life with many different collection methods is that all those collected ideas end up in a bunch of different places or at best in one of many inboxes you might have. Having one inbox with everything is in my case the key to success. Well that is if I empty it of course, and even more importantly, actually do the stuff that was in the inbox. Because emptying the inbox is a good start but only half way there.

A key factor for me starting to use the system is that I create a system that is complete and that my brain really trusts is a better storage area for ideas rather than the brain itself. We'll see what happens. Firstly I must get rmindr to the next level where I can start trusting at least parts of the system, and then keep on working on it until I'm all the way there.

For me it was an absolute relief just to have somewhere to unload my brain of ideas when I first starting using GTD. In my case I used Things and mostly my Someday/Maybe list which by now is very long. I've implemented Inbox Zero with my email which works great for me even if I don't get super amounts of email (around 50 per day) but my inbox is empty now and is every night.

How would you like to collect ideas? I want to create a small app for OS X and Vista and others that run in the background and listens to a shortcut and opens a collect box from what ever application you are in. When clicking save, the message will be stored in your rmindr inbox. So if you are good at Cocoa or .Net and want to use my soon coming API, feel free to contact me here.

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• Minipreneurship - What can be done in 24 hours? (anders.tyckr.com)
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Image by dead_squid via Flickr

Ok, he really take things to a whole new level. Talk about having an organized desk. Look at this video for some tips on how to implement your own system. That's really what this is all about - implementing your own system. Your mind have to be confident that things will not be forgotten once they're put into your system. With my new service productivity tool I want to give you an opportunity to build a system that you can trust.

One of my biggest problems implementing GTD has been that I have so many different inboxes, and it has been difficult to carry around all the different lists that need to be used. That was the reason I built rmindr.com - it gives me one global inbox that I always can access, and through RSS always access my lists from any phone or other device with an RSS reader.

The answer is quite simply: A lot!

Yesterday at 12 noon the first 24 hour business camp ended. I participated with my Getting Things Done service rmindr.com that I first wrote about a while back.

My 24 hours consisted of everything between 4-hour-dig-downs in weird php errors (later saved by a Hjalmar php hack), and taking a soothing bath outside in 40 degrees water overlooking the snowcovered rocks in the Stockholm archipelago spa Hasseludden Yasuragi.

The event itself was without a doubt one of the best and most productive entrepreneurial events I've been to. The location certainly added to the excitement, but mostly it was the people's attitude towards entrepreneurship that made an impact on me. When the event ended, the participants were asked if they would want venture capital for their idea, and only about 3 out of 90 put their hands up.

I don't want to put too much into that because it is normally not 24 hour ideas that get funded anyways, but it shows that starting a service or product on the internet has never been easier or cheaper. These services will not likely be the next Google's or Amazon's, but it can easily be services that bring in some revenue for their creators. This type of "minipreneurship" is really starting to boom, and events like 24hbc is proof of that. You can easily start something in 24 hours if you put your mind to it and make sure to focus your idea.

Learning from my Seedcamp experience "focus" and "metrics" are the two most important words I've brought with me. So based on that this is how I focused by 24 hours at 24hbc:

• Step 1: Make my development setup work on the production server. (to enable fast deploy during the development)
• Step 2: Define basic functionality for the site to be valuable. For rmindr.com those features were:
  • Create actions with tags and notes
  • Access context lists through a private rss feed
  • Move actions to different focuses (inbox, next, someday/maybe, scheduled)
  • Collect ideas by sms from a cellphone
• Step 3: Define advanced features that can be included if there is time left
• Step 4: implement

I managed to get all of step 1 and 2 done to a level where they could be released in an alpha version. I never managed to get into the very necessary but quite advanced feature of organizing actions into projects in an infinite number of levels. That will come in the beta release. Maybe in another 24 hours... or not.

I've had this idea for almost a year now and I did the interface design this summer. So an event like 24hbc was exactly the push I needed to get it out there.

Thanks for any input regarding rmindr.com and feel free to vote for my project at http://www.24hourbusinesscamp.com.