Analytics Lessons Learned

leananalyticsbook.com

68 points·byosko··5 comments

Love all of these case studies. People run around talking about "growth hack this" and "growth hack that" and then talk about SEO and Facebook. It's nice to see some actual examples where companies gain some deep understanding or glean some unique insight that totally changes the way they think in order to gain an edge.

Rule of thumb with vague terminology: if the words or concepts used in any arbitrary argument are vague - said argument is often full of bullshit.

And for the smart asses out there: yes I know that the above argument is itself vague. It's an example of a self-referential heuristic like Hofstader's Law (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hofstadters_law).

You're a cool dude...

I'd like to see material like this presented along with the failure cases and an analysis of why they failed. I expect there are many cases where businesses will fail even though they do things "right" just because dumb luck. This reminds me of the TED Talk about medical journals only publishing affirmative results.

Not all of the companies are successful or have been successful. They were successful at a specific point in time, doing a specific thing (like getting through problem interviews, for example) but it doesn't mean they were big hits as companies.

And many of the cases studies are about companies that were struggling with problems and managed to improve. The e-book specifically (and Lean Analytics, the book) aren't about understanding why startups failed, they're about how to use analytics to minimize failure and iterate past it.

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