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34 Startup Metrics for Tech Entrepreneurs

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34 Startup Metrics for Tech Entrepreneurs

Courtesy of: Funders and Founders

34 Startup Metrics That Tech Entrepreneurs Need to Know

Today’s infographic comes from Funders and Founders and information designer Anna Vital, and it lists the important metrics to gauge traction and success of new startups.

Several years ago, a key challenge with launching a new tech startup venture was that there weren’t many precedents to follow.

  • How do you scale a company?
  • How do you measure growth and costs in a more meaningful way?
  • Does the company have real traction?

Of course, there were knowledgeable people in the tech ecosystem that knew these things – for example, venture capitalists and ex-founders that had been successful with previous ventures – but they were tough to gain access to, and many of their theories and best practices weren’t yet widespread.

Fast forward to today, and the practices around new startups are much more established. While this can be a blessing and a curse to new founders, at least a more standardized set of metrics helps to give founders a sense of where their company stands.

Key Startup Metrics, According to VCs

The infographic from Funders and Founders lists 34 startup metrics for founders to know – but which one should be a focus for new ventures?

Here’s what three bigtime VCs have said about the startup metrics that they consider to be most important at early stages:

“Month-over-Month Organic Growth”

For most companies, MoM organic growth is a very useful metric and depending on the base, 20–50% MoM growth can be good. Retention, referral, and churn are all things we look at, too.

– Aileen Lee, Cowboy Ventures

According to Aileen Lee, who originally came up with the “unicorn” term, organic growth is a particularly useful metric.

On the other hand, Bill Gurley of Benchmark says that monitoring conversions is a comprehensive metric that is a good proxy for several key business areas.

“Conversion Rate”

No other metric so holistically captures as many critical aspects of a web site – user design, usability, performance, convenience, ad effectiveness, net promoter score, customer satisfaction – all in a single measurement.

– Bill Gurley, Benchmark

Paul Graham, of Y Combinator fame, says that the metric depends on the stage. If you have revenue, then revenue growth is the metric you want. If you’re not there yet, user growth is a good proxy.

“Revenue Growth or Active Users”

The best thing to measure the growth rate of is revenue. The next best, for startups that aren’t charging initially, is active users. That’s a reasonable proxy for revenue growth because whenever the startup does start trying to make money, their revenues will probably be a constant multiple of active users.

– Paul Graham, VC and co-founder of Y Combinator

It should also be noted that the most relevant metric to you depends on your business model. For example, MRR (Monthly recurring revenue) and churn rates would be particularly important to SaaS (Software-as-a-service) startups, while MAUs (Monthly active users) and organic traffic may be more important measurements for online media companies.

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AI

Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

We visualized the results of an analysis by the World Economic Forum, which uncovered the jobs most impacted by AI.

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Charted: The Jobs Most Impacted by AI

This was originally posted on our Voronoi app. Download the app for free on iOS or Android and discover incredible data-driven charts from a variety of trusted sources.

Large language models (LLMs) and other generative AI tools haven’t been around for very long, but they’re expected to have far-reaching impacts on the way people do their jobs. With this in mind, researchers have already begun studying the potential impacts of this transformative technology.

In this graphic, we’ve visualized the results of a World Economic Forum report, which estimated how different job departments will be exposed to AI disruption.

Data and Methodology

To identify the job departments most impacted by AI, researchers assessed over 19,000 occupational tasks (e.g. reading documents) to determine if they relied on language. If a task was deemed language-based, it was then determined how much human involvement was needed to complete that task.

With this analysis, researchers were then able to estimate how AI would impact different occupational groups.

DepartmentLarge impact (%)Small impact (%)No impact (%)
IT73261
Finance70219
Customer Sales671617
Operations651817
HR57412
Marketing56413
Legal46504
Supply Chain431839

In our graphic, large impact refers to tasks that will be fully automated or significantly altered by AI technologies. Small impact refers to tasks that have a lesser potential for disruption.

Where AI will make the biggest impact

Jobs in information technology (IT) and finance have the highest share of tasks expected to be largely impacted by AI.

Within IT, tasks that are expected to be automated include software quality assurance and customer support. On the finance side, researchers believe that AI could be significantly useful for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing.

Still interested in AI? Check out this graphic which ranked the most commonly used AI tools in 2023.

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