As a small-business owner, what are your KPIs informing and dictating your decisions
I haven't been an entrepreneur for very long, let alone an actual small-business owner, so I'm looking for insight into what you have defined as your business' KPIs (key performance indicator).
To give a starting point of reference: I aim to bootstrap digital companies and products (nothing physical or with a real location). I'm thinking between 1-10 employees as a small-business? Sure, that sounds alright.
Additionally, what do you use to track your KPIs?
It really depends on what your business is offering and what phase you're at. Generally speaking…
Also, while you're measuring stuff, keep an eye on your burn rate. You should always know how many months you have left before your company dies, since the 90% of the battle is just not dying.
Personally, one of my two goals right now is to grow the Indie Hackers forum (the other is to make it more useful). That involves tracking things like how happy users are with the site (signup conversion rates and the # of return visits per week), how good the discussions are (the % of threads that get comments), how fast the forum is moving (the # of threads created per day), how much novelty there is (the # of unique users creating threads), etc.
I was under the impression that most small-businesses could benefit from only seeing their top-level metrics (traffic acquisition, sources, mobile performance, referrals, SEO metrics, and their business metrics from services, such as braintree, stripe, HubSpot, etc.), but It seems that I misunderstood how diverse each business' top-level focus could be. For example, I assumed that every business would want to know where referrals are coming from and more about their users, but depending on what phase their in, they may not.
Great question. I work in a startup selling SaaS and spend a lot of time on marketing and tracking our KPIs.
It really varies based on the size of the company and your business model.
If it's just you and your product is SaaS, at this stage, KPIs is just a buzzword. But assuming you have a few paying customers, you should focus on number of paying users and MRR. To get that, you'd need to also look at increasing your sign ups (acquisition) whilst reducing the cost to get users to sign up (CPA).
Aside from pure KPIs, the most important thing is to understand whether you're solving a real need and finding the smallest set of features that will solve the majority of that need (80/20).
Good luck :) I know how difficult it can be especially at the early stages to figure out which KPIs to track and hit (that's why I built FinMod).
Do you think these metrics are important for any small-business, regardless of how many paying customers?
Yeah, absolutely. Whether you're starting out with 1 or have thousands of paying customers, tracking paying customers and MRR are essential if your primary objective is financial success.
Alongside those, you'd have a bunch of other metrics (whether quantitative or qualitative) that would grow in number as you grow.
Happy to share advice on your specific business. What are you working on right now? Feel free to email me!
I'm working on a metric dashboard that allows users to compare individual social platform posts based on performance and is community-based (real-time chat with small-business owners, ability to compete, congratulate, and motivate added friends, etc.).
What I am wanting to do is limit the # of metrics all small-business owners can see, which has it's obvious downside, but I think if I find out what the most important, generic 6-10 are, I can create a snapshot of their business and social platforms in a very helpful and actionable way.
In that case, for social, I'd recommend just focusing on the key growth and engagement numbers. ie followers/fans, likes, shares, comments, RTs etc.
Good luck with it and look forward to seeing your progress!