who has completed an action that might lead to potential revenue. Alternatively, you could count someone who has clicked X times within your app, or someone who has a session time of more than 60 seconds. RETENTION. If you
The system was flexible enough to track every single ‘referral code’ back to a user, a driver or a specific marketing promotion
can’t keep users coming back, then your app is doomed. At Hailo we measured this as how many times a user opened up the app per month, and how many times they opened the app and requested a taxi. You can also drill down to the level of measuring how many times per month a user opens or clicks on the emails that you send to them. REFERRAL. This can be a tricky metric to track, so it helps to build a product
feature to encourage it. From Day One we built in the ability to input into the passenger app on Hailo ‘promotion codes’ that would give passengers ?5, ?10 or more off their next taxi ride. REVENUE. You should be aiming to make this work from the very beginning.
We monitored not only spending per customer, but also any discounts, refunds and the actual gross margin we made per user. We also monitored how much people were tipping their drivers.
Understanding and driving this metric is critical to success
Putting Metrics into Action Your goal – even at this MVP stage – is to put these metrics into action. You don’t need to delve into more complex ones at this stage, but you do need to understand how these metrics map out your user lifecycle. The first thing you want to do is plot out what you think your user lifecycle is going to be. This is best explained with a real example – let’s use Hailo again. Our first model was pretty simple (and was refined down the line). Stage
14 Make Something People Love 15 New and Improved Version 1.0 16 The Metrics of Success 17 Getting Your Growth On 18 Dollars in the Door 19 Seducing Venture Capital Step 3: The Hundred-Million-Dollar App Tuning Your Revenue Engine, Growing Users and Raising Series B Funding 20 A Colorful Lesson 21 Tuning and Humming 22 Getting Shedloads of Users 23 Revenue-Engine Mechanics 24 Keeping Users Coming Back 25 International Growth 26 Growth is a Bitch 27 Money for Scale Step 4: The Five-Hundred-Million-Dollar App Scaling Your Business and Raising Series C Funding 28 Shifting Up a Gear 29 Big Hitters 30 Scaling Marketing 31 Killer Product Expansion 32 Scaling Product Development and Engineering 33 Scaling People 34 Scaling Process 35 Financing at a Big Valuation Step 5: The Billion-Dollar App The Promised Land
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