Show HN: the6pct : a tool to help you track weekly growth based on PG's essay
the6pct.com
Built this as a quickie to help me apply the method outlined in PG's Startup = Growth essay.
the6pct.com
Growth happens on a larger and more complex scale than a weekly sum. Furthermore, if you're expecting your actions for any given week to correlate directly with growth that happens that week, you're doing it wrong.
Do you need to work hard? Of course. Should you procrastinate? Of course not. Is the key to this tracking your weekly growth. No! You risk misdirecting your efforts, becoming far too short-sighted, and falling into the dangerous trap of running your company only on those quantifiable and measurable numbers. You risk missing the complexity which results in growth, and instead narrowing your focus to the point where it actually stagnates growth or produces the wrong kind of growth.
See W. Edwards Deming's management treatise that helped bring Japan out of a recession—http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Edwards_Deming#Key_principle... - one of his recommendations was to "Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership." And a pitfall he pointed out—"Running a company on visible figures alone." More can be found in his books, which mostly are targeted toward manufacturing but I find apply incredibly well to software business.
Please, don't limit yourself to this sort of narrow-minded analysis of your business, or at least be very aware of the consequences and consider it only as an interesting result, never use it as a target or benchmark, and especially don't use it to try to motivate or pressure your employees. Your results will slowly shift toward optimizing your measured goal alone, and your company will become as narrow and pointless as the number.
Can this metric be used? Of course. You can look back on your efforts over the long (or short) term, and if you see a decent 6% growth rate, great. If you don't, then you may need to change something. But you have to understand it intimately; that it's not a goal, not a target, but a simple metric to be used post-facto to make useful and realistic changes to your strategy. I'm not warning you against using all numeric analysis, but I am warning against using it as a true goal or target. Just keep it in perspective, and I fear a web site that makes the metric as clear and visible as this site does brings it far too close to the front of your daily attention than it should be.
Growth comes from many complex sources, toward many time frames and overarching goals; and the target is not a weekly number, but instead, a growing and sustainable company. Work toward that.
Maybe the caveat should be: "If you want to play the high-growth startup game". Measuring weekly growth apparently is a tool that works in that context.
It is my opinion that this sort of thinking builds unsustainable companies. There either needs to be an incredible shift in the way growth is looked at and achieved at some point in the company's life (which to me, seems unlikely or at least a difficult change of course)—or the company can start out with sustainable growth in mind. There is no reason that a company designed for overall quality rather than speed cannot also be a fast growing company; but I think they'll look at their strategy much differently. And that way of thinking will last them through hiring, market expansion, and beyond.
Maybe they are compatible strategies and I'm just over-thinking it. But I can't help but see the recent articles about how few long-term successful companies arise from tech accelerators and think how strikingly relevant they are.
http://fr.anc.is/2012/09/26/the-6-pct/
The key is: if you are ready & willing to play the high-growth startup game
so... how should you measure without numbers?
"During Y Combinator we measure growth rate per week, partly because there is so little time before Demo Day, and partly because startups early on need frequent feedback from their users to tweak what they're doing. [..] This is, obviously, only for startups that have already launched or can launch during YC. A startup building a new database will probably not do that. On the other hand, launching something small and then using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that could start this way probably should. "
"using growth rate as evolutionary pressure is such a valuable technique that any company that could start this way probably should." -> that looks like exactly what the 6% check is for - a simple tool to keep you motivated, not to rely your whole strategy upon.
Instahero lets you just write one or two lines of Lua and visualize/report on any metric you want.
Sorry about the plug, this tool is just similar to what I'm working on to solve a more general problem.
That said, I do like the tool, it's very easy and straightforward, good job!
I like the idea of having a single page per metric
http://www.instahero.com/project/wWhe4J/report/jRa9Qz/
This is very easy to create using whichever metric you like (I will probably include it as one of the pre-made report templates, too), and you can extend it to report on whatever you like.
Thank you very much for the idea!
"GET http://yoursite.com/secret returns {"data": [1,2,3,4,5,6,7]}"
But is that an array of data for the last seven days, or the current week, or is it 7 separate analytics that I want to get tracked?
"JSON Format
Expected JSON is a dict with key 'data' and value an array of 7 integers for last 7 days, last day last."