The Fizzle team has been hyper-focused on growth over the past month, and we’re seeing encouraging results.
As a team, we select a different “theme” each quarter to guide our project work. Our current theme is simply membership growth. We always care about growth, but these themes give us a chance to turn all our attention to one specific thing for a while to make new breakthroughs.
When the growth theme began, I started by creating an all-new metrics dashboard (we use a great tool called Geckoboard to monitor our most important stats). On this dashboard, I added some basic measurements: number of signups per day, week, month and over six months, and top signup sources. It’s simple, direct and to-the point. Here’s a snapshot of three of the metrics:
The entire team bookmarked this dashboard, and we look at it daily. I look at it multiple times per day, and have a pinned tab open all the time.
This simple dashboard gives us instant feedback on how our efforts are impacting the main goal of this quarter’s theme. Having different views (daily, weekly, monthly and every six months) is important. With just one view, the data would be either too granular or too course. You need small time frames to stay focused on day-to-day improvements, and longer time frames to see trends.
What gets measured gets done is an incredibly powerful phrase. By focusing all of our extra efforts on growth for just a month, we’ve already seen a doubling of our rate of signups.
Of course, it’s not good enough just to measure and watch your metrics. You also have to break down your goals into hypotheses and actions. You also have to measure sub-goals. In our case our sub-goals involve conversion rates, click-through rates and top-line growth of traffic, downloads and email subscriptions.
But the dashboard is where it all starts. It keeps us focused and provides external data-driven validation. Instead of high-level philosophical discussions about what we should be working on, we all agree after brief conversations: “let’s test it and see what happens.”
If you’ve been floundering recently, wondering what to focus on, and whether your efforts are having any significant impact, try this: choose one specific metric to improve for a while. Subscribers, sales, traffic, followers, comments, consistency of publishing, anything that contributes to overall progress in your business.
Then, create a basic dashboard that breaks down your primary metric by different time periods. Use Google Analytics or Clicky or Geckoboard, or whichever tool can help you unlock the data you need with the least amount of wrangling.
Make sure you review your progress daily, and focus on the goal long enough to have an impact. Break down the goal into sub-goals and corresponding actions.
You might be surprised how such a simple strategy can have such significant influence over the direction of your business. Give it a shot.
Learn how to set goals that actually stick!
The Top 10 Mistakes in Online Business
Every week we talk with entrepreneurs. We talk about what’s working and what isn’t. We talk about successes and failures. We spend time with complete newbies, seasoned veterans, and everything in between.
One topic that comes up over and over again with both groups is mistakes made in starting businesses. Newbies love to learn about mistakes so they can avoid them. Veterans love to talk about what they wish they had known when starting out.
These conversations have been fascinating, so we compiled a list of the 10 mistakes we hear most often into a nifty lil' guide. Get the 10 Most Common Mistakes in Starting an Online Business here »
We measure 3 things weekly:
-Contracted Work
-Delivered Work
-Colleced CAsh
Nothing else matters at all. We check leads and traffic quarterly, and we try hard to confine this to a Google Spreadsheet we do on fridays.
Nice, work in, work out, and payment. I’d suggest a way to get feedback in there, but that may be tired to contracting work easily enough.
PS. You may want to add your website or something to Disqus profile, I wanted to look up your site and what you do.
This came at a great time for me, Corbett. Thank you. It’s definitely easy to get overwhelmed by all the metrics. That gets me working on half a dozen things at once without any real sense or progress. So I like your idea to narrow it down to a single metric and focus on it exclusively. Thanks again, -Corey
I like the idea of selecting one “focus theme” for a few months. That is a great way to avoid bouncing from metric to metric and losing steam on the measurement (and the activities…).
One point: There are different types of metrics that you can measure at different points in your companies life. For example, early on it might be number of website visitors or email signups. Later as your business grows, you can focus on referrals from existing customers. Different metrics are useful at the various stages and will definitely help focus your attention and activities on the business results you’re driving.
I wrote a summary of this topic (since I think it’s super useful!) http://insightscope.com/pirate-metrics-framework/
Crazy Egg is awesome as well! With heatmaps etc.
Just shared this article with my buddy via e-mail, as he was just chatting me about being stuck thinking about work but not knowing what to do, where to go next.
I’ve implemented this sort of idea by each day of the week I have a different business focus, sure there’s clients to take care of and responding, there’s always responding…but one focus a day for proactive action, the opposite of responding, the generating. One of those days is to review, dig out, and remind myself of the metrics…go to look at the subscriber count and trends, the traffic, the popularity of stuff I’ve posted so on and so forth, looks like the attached picture on the calendar.
Each day I have a pretty distinct goal, and take away. Sometimes because of that focus I decide to clear a few days and keep working on that focus if it’s big enough, interests me enough or it’s going to be good for business.
The quote that always comes to my mind that’s similar is “what get’s measured get’s managed” but I think I like yours better Corbett. Cheers
EDIT: image didn’t seem to appear anywhere so here it is http://take.ms/jyELB
Good work, Rob!