Startup KPIs: Appreciate your progress and set your goals

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The first best way to mesure your business success is a growing turnover. Yes, but unfortunately there are not a lot of businesses that will earn lots of money from the first day or even the first year and it does not mean you failed either.
That is why it is important to have KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) and KPIs are not limited to turnover, benefits or Sales figures only.

Being a very young startup and not having big teams is not an excuse to not have KPIs and  as per my experience so far it is not a luxury to set them right from the beginning. This is true as well even if you are working alone. I think it is even more important because when you work alone you need to mesure your progress to not loose motivation.

After we launched All Made In France, we set a list of KPIs. I will describe you in this article how we chose them, and how they helped us.

How we selected our KPIs

First of all we chose KPIs that are not complex to calculate. The main reason is that we do not have a lot of time to spend on that for the moment (like every startup we have very limited resources). 
Secondly we tried to select one or two for each department: for example one for Sales metrics, one for social media metrics, one for our digital metrics. Those KPIs will obviously change and the more you grow the more indicators you will need to mesure your performances. 

The tools we use to support it

KPI is relevant only when the information is accurate. That's why we chose some tools to help us easily calculate some of those KPIs. One of our favourite tools for social media statistics for example is Crowdfire (that I listed in my top 5 apps for entrepreneurs here). 
Then you have the obvious list of tools that provide you great KPIs like Google Analytics or Twitter analytics.

Application

These are examples of KPIs you can choose for your startups. Some of them are the one we track for All Made In France (discover the launch of the All Made In France MVP here) and the other startups I am working with

Sales: 
    • Number of leads or prospects. This helps you to quantify the prospection job you do. I think it is important to measure your leads growth capacity. 
    • Number of converted prospects. The point of conversion is totally your choice. It can be a purchase (conversion to a customer), it can be a first exchange with the lead. It has to be the first important milestone you target. So for example if you created a new app and you are trying to get people to test it, the conversion point will be the trial conversion.
Social Media
    • Followers: When you start what you can track is your capacity to attract people and it will be mainly measured by the number of new followers or like, whatever the social media you chose.
Website 
    • I will write another post to explain all the basic website indicators but the most easily and first important milestone is the number of Unique visitors and the average time spent on your website. Then when you get better to it, you can start checking conversion rate.
Blog
    • The number of views: obvious KPI.
    • Your blog is usually used to then attract people to use or see your products. So the second important metric is to measure the number of clicks to your website from the blog. 

As soon as you have your KPIs set some goals.
Start with monthly objectives and do not hesitate to check your measures on a regular basis. Those help you to boost yourself and your team. There is no such a better way to progress than trying to reach objectives.
Don't set the objectives too high but not too low either: set them slightly higher than what you think is achievable.










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3 comments

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