Comments on: Quantitative approaches to consumer internet

By: Gopi

Gopi — Sat, 26 Jan 2008 00:57:50 +0000

>> smartest things to do is to keep a low-profile, gather millions of customers, and go from there

absolutely true, if you look back you will see usually the most hyped companies in techcrunch (like flock or edgeio) never made it big. Compare those companies with the ones no one cared in the begining (ex: youtube).

By: Hiten Shah

Hiten Shah — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 23:36:53 +0000

I couldn’t agree with you more here. There are so many things that should be optimized regarding a new app, its just that the right data needs to be tracked and evaluated. Another point here is that people tend to get so focused on entirely the wrong numbers. What’s the use of a big PR push or driving a ton of traffic when you aren’t even sure what those visitors are doing or if you’re making the most of that push.

By: Nik

Nik — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 06:21:24 +0000

Having been on both sides of the fence, I agree that consumer internet sites have to be far more metric driven than enterprise side firms.

But, for a resource constrained startup (not just to track the metrics but also to act on them), one has to make a choice between deciding whether to get deep metrics on a particular area (e.g. One specific channel for user acquisition) or go broad on a range of metrics (e.g. Retention, Engagement etc...)

The choice we made is to go deep in one specific area and track/analyse the metrics for one specific driver as opposed to a broader area.