Figure 3. Example of customer life cycle in a web startup.
At one web startup, our review meetings were discussions of the results of testing our hypotheses in the real world. We had made some assumptions about potential customers and already had a live website. So we put together a spreadsheet that tracked these customers and numbers on a monthly basis. Each month we reported to the board on progress in registered users, activations, retained users, etc.
Listing 1 shows an example of these reports
Listing 1. Example of metrics for a web startup.
A startup selling through a direct sales force will also want to monitor things like average order size, expected customer value, average time to first order, average time to subsequent orders, sales rate across salespeople, time for a new salesperson to become effective.
Whatever your business model, you need to pay close attention to cambodia phone number library the rate at which you are spending your capital, the number of months of capital you have left, and the time it will take you to break-even.
Reach an agreement with your investors
If you have investors, work with them to agree on the metrics that why a language stay for middle school students at all saints’ day? make sense for your startup. What numbers represent the life or death of your startup? (These numbers should be related to the hypothesis you are testing in Customer Discovery and Validation.) Agree with your investors that these will be the numbers australia aatabase airectory they will be reviewing in regular meetings. Also agree that there may be times when the numbers show that the chosen business model is not worth scaling into a company, and that they will then agree that it is time to go back and look for a different business model.