Confined and bored, decided to give a this book a read. Lean Analytics is one of the Lean books, a series curated by Eric Ries, founder of the Lean movement and author of The Lean Startup.
“Data is the antidote to delusion.”
- Alistair Croll & Benjamin Yoskovitz
This book is mainly tailored to companies at the startup or the founding phase. It gives a couple of lessons on how to leverage data to be on you side and scale up. It mainly goes through what are the most metrics for different business models throughout different stages.
Not all statistics is useful. Be Data-informed, not data-driven.
This is one of the hardest lessons for anybody working with data professionally. The book explains why data should be the passenger not the driver in your decisions starting a new business. Choosing the right metric and even defining what a “metric” is may sound simple, but it has lots into it.
Choosing the right metric is also highly correlated to your business type. Is it SaaS? e-Commerce, Mobile App, Two-Sided Marketplaces, User-generated Content, or a Media site. The book explains what are the right metrics and their baseline for each of these models.
Focus: Pick one metric and make it actionable.
Although this may sound unproductive but the authors stress on the fact that you should focus only on one, key metric at a time.
Stages: Which data at what time?
The book describes the lifecycle of each company in phases and explains how its data model should transform at each stage. The main phases:
1. Empathy: This is where you connect with other people to determine a real problem that they have, which you can solve.
2. Stickiness: Where you figure out how to efficiently solve that problem in a way that people would be happy to pay for.
3. Virality: Here you build product features that keep people coming back and referring friends to make the product itself better.
4. Revenue: That’s when you start growing, expanding, and making sure you’re profitable. Scale. When your company tries to enter new markets and starts hiring a lot, you know you’re scaling up.
Personally I think this book is highly valuable if you are starting an online business. The agility of measuring, creating, and switching metrics is a luxury only Internet business posses. Honestly, while all of the advice in the book can be extremely helpful, they render themself impractical in a corporate or enterprise environment.