When starting a business probably most people rely mostly on gut feeling.
Yes, decisions may be validated with early adopters but there's still not much data to tell if the assumptions are correct.
But as a business grows it collects more data that allows making more precise data-driven decisions. KPIs starting to make more sense as they no longer show random fluctuations and can clearly tell where the business is going. That's crucial to motivate a team, let them know the impact of their work, project future trajectory or even spot that something isn't right before it became a problem.
Digging into this data can optimize the business. What're your top sources of revenue? Are you focused on improving them? Top expenses? Can you cut those? Are you and your team working on things that matter the most? Only data can give the right answers.
Monitoring a business is also very important. Are your goods running out of stock? Maybe the web site is down? Or it's under heavy load and your customers are frustrated? The customer hasn't picked up an order and it would be shipped back in 2 days? Someone isn't using your SaaS for a long time and is about to churn? Do you have software in place to know that something's not right?
On our current project, we hacked our own KPI dashboard with key metrics like total revenue, top-paying customers, distribution of revenue between sources of customers and between features. We also extensively use google analytics and our affiliate program to track marketing campaigns and where our customers are coming from in general. As a software product that heavily relies on non-ideal 3rd party data, we also have monitoring that notifies when something went horribly wrong, data may be incorrect or missing and requires manual intervention, the whole data provider behaves strangely, etc.
Having those in place not only allowed us to greatly improve our quality, grow and focus on what's most important for our customers, but also to make stronger relations with one of our data providers, improving his quality with our feedback and helping him to land 5 more customers turning his somewhat side-hustle into the main business.
Still, crafting everything by hand took too much time. There must be software for this already and there is.
Talked to some local e-commerce and retail business owners. They mostly use one software for inventory management, bookkeeping, orders and everything else, including analytics. Interesting reports they are running are top customers in total revenue percentage and products that make or don't make top X revenue percentage (like top 20% and the bottom 10%).
Do You Know How Your Business Is Doing and Where It’s Going?
If so, what software are you using for that?
Yes, decisions may be validated with early adopters but there's still not much data to tell if the assumptions are correct.
But as a business grows it collects more data that allows making more precise data-driven decisions. KPIs starting to make more sense as they no longer show random fluctuations and can clearly tell where the business is going. That's crucial to motivate a team, let them know the impact of their work, project future trajectory or even spot that something isn't right before it became a problem.
Digging into this data can optimize the business. What're your top sources of revenue? Are you focused on improving them? Top expenses? Can you cut those? Are you and your team working on things that matter the most? Only data can give the right answers.
Monitoring a business is also very important. Are your goods running out of stock? Maybe the web site is down? Or it's under heavy load and your customers are frustrated? The customer hasn't picked up an order and it would be shipped back in 2 days? Someone isn't using your SaaS for a long time and is about to churn? Do you have software in place to know that something's not right?
On our current project, we hacked our own KPI dashboard with key metrics like total revenue, top-paying customers, distribution of revenue between sources of customers and between features. We also extensively use google analytics and our affiliate program to track marketing campaigns and where our customers are coming from in general. As a software product that heavily relies on non-ideal 3rd party data, we also have monitoring that notifies when something went horribly wrong, data may be incorrect or missing and requires manual intervention, the whole data provider behaves strangely, etc.
Having those in place not only allowed us to greatly improve our quality, grow and focus on what's most important for our customers, but also to make stronger relations with one of our data providers, improving his quality with our feedback and helping him to land 5 more customers turning his somewhat side-hustle into the main business.
Still, crafting everything by hand took too much time. There must be software for this already and there is.
Talked to some local e-commerce and retail business owners. They mostly use one software for inventory management, bookkeeping, orders and everything else, including analytics. Interesting reports they are running are top customers in total revenue percentage and products that make or don't make top X revenue percentage (like top 20% and the bottom 10%).
Do You Know How Your Business Is Doing and Where It’s Going?
If so, what software are you using for that?
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