Week one out of the 13 weeks of the TechStars program is over and we are thinking “what were we able to accomplish and what are the lessons learnt throughout the past week?”
TechStars is your family for the next 3 months
One of the first sentences Jon Bradford, the general manager of TechStars London said to us was: “Look at people surrounding you. These are going to be your family members for the next 3 months. This group contains former CEOs and CTOs of successful companies, lead designers from different fields, nuclear scientists (shout out to the Lingvist team) and PHD fellows (check out the awesome group from Madrid - Proximus).
We get it. This group has a phenomenal skillset that together can create amazing companies.
To get this family feeling, the TechStars team organized 3 drinks events (warning: I may become an alcoholic at this pace), a stag-hunt across London and a show and tell event where each team discusses where they are at, what they hope to accomplish and how they can use us to help. These relationships and the bond we will create are definitely off to a good start!
Stop Using Vanity Metrics!
As an ongoing process in TechStars, companies have a weekly meeting with their managing directors (in our case, Jon Bradford and Jens Lapinski) to understand where the business is at, how to grow it and how to measure this growth.
As part of eRated’s first meeting, we discussed our KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) for successful growth. Among the important KPIs we measure, we also listed “Number of Marketplaces” and “Number of Users”. These two KPIs are what Eric Ries (author of The Lean Startup) calls Vanity Metrics.
Vanity metrics are all those data points that make us feel good if they go up but don’t help us make decisions. In our case, the number of users in our system and the number of marketplaces using our platform will grow due to our business development efforts. But how can we act upon this growth? Wouldn’t measuring growth in the number of users per week make more sense?
After this meeting, we refactored and minimized the number of KPIs that make our business tick. In the next posts I’ll keep you posted as to how we are KPIS are doing.
What have we accomplished?
I am sure most of you had the chance to check out our new and beautifully designed website. This was a big win for Guy and Yoav and for us as a team. In addition, we plan to finish up our roadmap for the next 6 months and our design of the new API is set to launch next week.
What do we hope to accomplish next week?
First off, survive the first “mentor whiplash” (a process in which each team meets 20 different mentors and gets bombarded with opinions and comments). Second, complete the development of the new API and launch this new version so we can start testing it out with our users and marketplaces.
Thanks for reading and see you in a couple of days! For now, feel free to comment here with any thought, question or comment and/or send me an email at [email protected].
Dan