Don’t Be a Metrics Slave
I love metrics. I live for metrics. Every week and every quarter I drown my team in metrics reviews. Why? Because metrics are the instrumentation — the flight panel — of our business. Good metrics provide clear insights. They cut through politics, spin, and haze. They spark amazing debates. They help you understand your business […]
Jump Starting a Small Business With Cloud Services
So you want to start a small business, perhaps a bootstrapped tech company? Good for you, I enjoy mine immensely. Let me suggest you adopt a rule that I’ve used for a long time: If it’s available in the Cloud, use the Cloud Service. Don’t roll your own or manage your own server, even if […]
The Very First Thing a Founding Team Needs to Do: Achieve Content-Audience Fit
A lot of entrepreneurs, when faced with the question, “What’s the most important thing to do first?”, would answer, “Build a product.” Big mistake. The most important thing to do first is to find an audience. It may be that building a product is an integral part of growing your audience, but you’re not ready to […]
Gaining the Wisdom of Crowds in a Bootstrapped SaaS Company
When you’re bootstrapping a small company, sometimes it’s hard to do the things larger organizations take for granted, like making sure you’re listening well enough to your customers. On the other hand, you can take advantage of your nimble nature and the availability of some great technology to do some things that even a lot […]
Big Data Predictions for 2012
Over the last several years, the desire to understand the surging rivers of digital data forming all around us has led inexorably towards something more meaningful than simple analysis. The rise of consumer analytics, and by that I mean analytics tools that literally anybody could and would use, could be arguably said to have begun
2012 Is Shaping Up As the Year of Open APIs
It was just over a decade ago that businesses were still wondering why it was necessary to have a Web site. Now it’s a foregone conclusion that they are one of the most important touchpoints for any organization to possess….
Webtrends Engage 2011, Making Web Analytics Sexy
I spent a few days this week catching up with Webtrends during its annual user event, Engage, in San Francisco. Web analytics is covered in my IDC group under CRM analytics but as most of you know this isn’t something…
RedMonk’s First Product: Developer Intelligence
“The future belongs to the companies and people that turn data into products.” – Mike Loukides, O’Reilly Radar Since I launched RedMonk with Stephen in 2002 a constant refrain has been “we don’t do numbers”. We have always been mighty skeptical about hockey stick projections and questionable survey data. But over time we both came […]
Bootstrappin’ the Buzz
How do Bootstrappers get the word out to customers that they have a better mousetrap? They have little money to spend and little time to invest. Yet there are ways. Consider my humble experiments to see what one man can do as a bootstrapper during my current jaunt between day jobs. Let me summarize the […]
Optimizing the Wrong Metric may be the root of All Evil in Marketing
Bootstrappers have to figure out how to market via the web. It’s the lowest cost, lowest friction, highest leverage medium available to get the word out. And, it is the easiest place to collect metrics so your decision making can be informed rather than just seat of the pants. But there are many dangers with […]
