Measuring Performance of Your Startup Venture

One of the benefits of being an engineer is the  analytical tools we are exposed to during our education as well as profession. The first semester of most engineering colleges have a drafting course, which helps us visualize objects in 2D, 3D etc. All throughout the program, we are trained and encouraged to measure the performance, be it of manpower or of machines.

As an engineer morphs into an entrepreneur, there are few things which one can take care of. I am listing below few of them which #-Link-Snipped-#can guide us towards a better venture of our own:

Financial

Cash in hand - how much cash I have in my account (usually current account with the bank)
Revenue - monthly run rate, growth over last month/year, pipeline or expected revenue for next few months
Profit - how much money is being made net of all expenses
Margin - what is my profit as a % of revenue?
Expenses - how much money am I spending every month? How much do I have and how long it will last in best or worst cases?

Customer

Number of customers - who have used our product/services
Number of new vs repeat customers - helps us understand customer characteristics, whether new customers are increasing or old customers are coming back
Revenue per customer - is the Average Revenue Per User increasing or not, which helps us check if we are moving to more valuable products
Retail vs institutional customers - whether you are reaching out to more retail customers (usually widespread, but low ARPU), or institutional (usually concentrated, but high ARPU)
Unique visitors - specially for a website or a retail store
Market share - what % of total market has been served?
PR - how many media have covered your company?

Technology

Product - number of errors reported, what stage is development at, whether timelines being followed
Patent - timelines followed and achieved or not
New product development - what % of revenue comes from new products
Complaints received for product

Team

Training time for new joinees
Productivity of new joinees
Number of sales team vs support team
Spend per employee
Revenue per employee

Is following the above metrics too much for your business? You can use a simple excel sheet and Google analytics to check few of these. However, do not rely just on measuring, but move and make things happen! All the best for your startup!

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About Nurture Talent Academy

Nurture Talent Academy (www.nurturetalent.com), India's 1st training institute for entrepreneurs, has conducted 30 workshops across 8 cities, attended by 350 startups, with over 90% satisfaction rate. Topics covered include finance, marketing and business plan.

Amit Grover, Founder, is an IIT Delhi and IIM Indore alumnus, and is a member of Mumbai Angels, having led over 20 early stage investments over 3.5 years.