sutton020

[Update 01/17/2015: There's a new company called  ChartMogul  ( which we invested in ) which makes it easy to get a real-time dashboard similar to the template below.  Check it out! ] [Note: This post first appeared as a guest post on the blog of Totango . In case you don't know Totango, it is a powerful analytics product which gives online services the information they need to increase user engagement, conversion and retention. If you're a SaaS company you should check it out. Thanks to Guy Nirpaz and his team for publishing my post, which I am republishing here.] In talking to a pretty large number of SaaS entrepreneurs in the last few years I've observed that there's a considerable amount of uncertainty around metrics: Which KPIs are the most important ones, what's the right way to calculate churn, CACs, MRR and other key metrics, how can I estimate customer lifetime value – these and other questions come up all the time, and the answers aren’t always obvi...

Last night I returned from a 2-day offsite with the Point Nine team (in Schlepzig, of all places). Our (small) full-time team more than doubled in the last six months, and this was the first time for all of us to spend some time together away from the daily bustle. We had a long list of topics that we wanted to discuss, ranging from investment theses to portfolio companies and to a number of projects that we're working on. I wanted to kick off things with a session about our OKRs (objective and key results), and we had scheduled two hours for this agenda item. If you haven't heard about OKRs before, it's a methodology invented by Intel and popularized by John Doerr, the famous VC who invested in Netscape, Amazon and Google. The idea is (simply put) that a company needs to have clear objectives and that every department, team and person in a company needs to have objectives – and a set of key results for hitting those objectives – which are aligned with the company-wide OKRs...