[Infographic] Startup Metrics for Humans

When running a startup, there are many metrics to optimize. The metrics can be convoluted and unclear of both nascent and experienced entrepreneurs.  This can turn into dashboards full of numbers, charts, and other vanity metrics. In the end, you won’t get the answers you were looking for. What to tweak? When to scale? Where to invest? To do that, you’ll need to know the stage your startup is at. With these startup stages, you can align the metrics necessary for the business and focus on them. When deciding on the stage where you’re at, try to be honest.

So, while some of this may be obvious to many of you who live and breathe these metrics all day long, we compiled a list of the most common or confusing ones. These metrics are all based on our own personal experience with the entrepreneurial climate, the ups and downs of growing a business.

But what is a startup?

According to the guru Steve Blank, we are talking about a “temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model”, while the small business runs according to the fixed business model.

For a startup founder this concept means the following three main functions:

• To provide a vision of a product with a set of characteristics;
• Create a series of sceneries of the business model regarding customers, distributions, and finance of the company.
• Understand, whether the model is the right one, based on customers behavior, as your model predicts.