These are my slides from my Data-Driven Startup presentation at the Lean Startup Circle in Cambridge, MA on July 22, 2010. Had a great time geeking out on Lean Startup, Customer Development and A/B Testing.
Please let me know if you found this presentation useful.
Note: See an updated version here: Creating a Data-Driven Startup.
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You make cool slides David. If I can go through the entire deck and pay attention, you have a winning slide deck. And I just for example did go through another deck about a hour ago, and I was bored before I reached slide 7 of 15 slides. Impressed.
Thanks for sharing your insight about Startups Biz.
Right. Even though your presentation is limited to website development & operation, when we start a business, we need to deeply think about business model-driven planning & implementation which are composed of assumption-testing and implementation. As you mentioned, data exists only for testing the effectiveness of assumptions, so that when we ask some questions about a startup business, we have to ask three questions:
-What is your business model?
-What kind of assumptions is your business model based on?
-Do you have any data or clue to verify them in terms of effectiveness?
Thanks again for your cool presentation.
JFDI is priceless.
Great presentation. I love how you focus on the fundamental principles. The humor makes it very enjoyable to read.
i have never completed a 72 page deck, until I saw this. Masterfully Done. Points Noted.
Good stuff, Dave, thanks for sharing.
Very nice.
This presentation helps one to get unstuck from 'stupid'.
Remember 'don't get stuck on stupid'?
It is a great time-waster, that tends to recycle excuses and reasons for not acting.
Give this a shot…between cycles of inactivity and motivational incubation.
David do you have any links to sample dashboard spreadsheets? (slide 42)
You crack me up by saying reading is worthless, now go read these two books, but the root point is a good one
Nice hard-hitting deck.
Great deck – I like that I got your points without hearing the audio. Most decks on slideshare can't say the same!
that deck is kick ass amigo
Great presentation!
You suggest a checklist in this order: operating dashboard, conversion funnel analysis, cohort analysis.
I'd say the checklist order is: operating dashboard, cohort analysis, and then the conversion funnel analysis.
It's what we're doing: we have a whole bunch of users, so we aren't interested right now in optimising our acquisition funnels, but we are instead most interested in engaging and retaining the users we already have.
Rahul/Rapportive
btw, we printed out and stuck up the Strategic Plan poster — love it
The problem of having a excel spreadsheet as a dashboard is that you have to update the data manually. So each time you want to check your dashboard, you need to update it first. It creates friction and you end up forgetting about your dashboard.
The fact that you have to update it manually is why I recommend Excel. It's
ok that it is painful at first, this is the GPS for your business, w/o it
you don't know if you wandering in circles. Startups are full of PAIN, get
used to it, brush it off and keep on smiling.
If your team finds this painful and gives up what are they going to do when
things really get hard?? Startups are rollercoasters, great highs and
crushing lows, updating Excel is a mild annoyance in the grand scheme of it
all. Hopefully you'll solve a real problem and make enough money to warrant
investing in automation.
;dc
Nice presentation (and entertaining), but it looks to me like your assertion that “there are no repeatable patterns to startup success” is completely contradicted by the rest of your presentation.
Are you not advocating a approach that can be repeated?
Alternatively, wouldn't you agree that there are repeatable patterns for startup failure?
But overall great job and thanks for sharing.
Great presentation! One thing though – I vote for using pie charts 0% of time
I totally agree with you! I don't use them at all, wonder what compelled me
to include them in my presentation….
;dc
Good point, totally different for your business. Most startups won't have enough users to warrant a cohort analysis.
;dc
Kevin,
Thanks for stopping by. The only repeatable patterns that I know of all lead to failure.
I don't see the contradiction. I am suggesting tools to add to your toolbelt. If you were building a house I'd advocate for using a hammer, but using a hammer doesn't mean you'll be successful at building a house.
I found this post extremely useful. I really enjoyed slide #42 The Company dashboard (I just made ours!).
Here are my questions:
#1 Is this dashboard updated on a daily basis?
#2 How do you determine churn rate on a daily basis?
What tools do you use to do Cohert analysis? If no tools how can one go about doing this?
Thanks again for the great post and very nice to meet you David.
Rishi
Rishi,
Thanks for the comment, and for checking out my presentation.
#1 Ideally this is daily, at my company we look at this version of our dashboard as a team once a week at our weekly team meeting (30mins or less).
#2 This really depends on your application. If you’re a paid app its very easy, its new cancellations of your service. For consumer/free apps it becomes harder to do daily but you can model out a rate of decay and use that (how many times does the avg user come back? Is this increasing or decreasing?)
There are no great tools for doing a cohort analysis, you can use excel but getting the data out of your systems is hard. This is why we created one at Performable. It’s in closed beta right now and we’re making it available to our paid customers. Look for it to go live (open to everyone) next month.
Cheers,
David
I loved the presentation: great ideas conveyed effectively. Thank you for sharing it.
Now I’m off to throw my own presentation packs on the digital bonfire and start all over.
I am glad I found your site. Getting reading to launch my online buisness and the keys in your slide presentation were eye opening. Is there anyway I can get the audio with the slide?
Very nice ppt. I am social game developer. Using all those shits everyday. Dashboard, Funnels and Cohort Analysis are core for data driven design.
I think more specifically, you might need some core metrics to ensure every major features are working fine. example, core metric for your sign up feature. just ensure less attrition for every release.
My two cents
“Optimize your startup for learning not data”
Are they not the same thing?
“No one cares how smart you are except for your mom.”
Great line. Great presentation. Thank you David.
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