How to Survive Your First Launch
Eric Ries gave us the concept of a Lean Startup - and everybody seems to embrace it these days. In case you haven’t read this book, I’d highly recommend to read it right now - it just explains so much.
Alright, if you just want a gist of it, here goes.
Whereas it is pretty easy set up and run traditional business (there is a lot of knowledge and models and live examples), startups exist to create something that did not exist before, and therefore no prior knowledge exists.
These companies have a distinctive set of features, which I hope to cover later, and the one thing I’d like to focus on right now, is the validated learning idea - or, to put it simply, startups have to be able to record their findings and measure their growth.
When you build this New Thing, tracking your progress is perhaps the last thing you are considering. The rationale is, you should be building product and pushing it out in a matter of weeks. So everything not vital for the MVP is cut and pushed back. That sadly may - and often does - include such silly things as bills, bank account statements and other boring stuff that the business people call KPI’s (or key performance indicators).
The reality? You are building your business, and the metrics matter! Why? Because that’s how you know how long your runway will last before the take-off happens. And what happens after the launch is equally important. The launch is just the first step, the first stage of your rocket to eject. Sadly, there is a little fun coming up with a tangible set of key indicators that measure the success of your business - but a much required one. If you look at the actual spaceship - or perhaps even at your car’s dashboard — you’ll see a lot of indicators. That’s how your vehicle is telling you whether it’s OK to go for a ride or if a better idea is to schedule a service trip instead. And if a tire runs flat all of a sudden, you’ll get a heads-up notice shortly before that (that “check tire pressure“ indicator).
Just like cars, startups come in different shapes and models. Enterprise, biotech, internet of things, finance - to name a few. And just like cars they need to be able to signal you if a malfunction is detected.
So, if you want to go beyond the launch - or even keep that milestone alive - you’ll need to have that dashboard. You can do it in a few ways:
Manually track the metrics that you find important (an Excel or Google spreadsheet that you have to update daily). Easy? Absolutely. Scalable? Not really. You need to be able to connect dependancies and it’s a good idea to automate the metrics update.
Connect your bank data and your main data provider data and your commerce data and many more together using API aggregators like Segment.io. Sounds cool. Except you need to be a technical founder to really dig that and perhaps you need to spend a bit more time tinkering with this solution before it actually works.
ERP or an accounting system. Many exist, but then again, you’ll spend a lot of time customizing it, and perhaps it’s an overkill for your company anyways at the stage this early. And you need to know the system. And you still need to connect data through API.
Well, is there an app for that?
YES. It’s called Flexceo and is designed to be a bare-bone solution for startups that automates KPI retrieval and has only the essential stuff onboard so that you don’t get off-track while launching.
Want to learn more? Follow this link - flexceo.com/features.