Your KPIs have to change as your business grows
Recently, I read a post called "What is your metric for success?" and I found it funny. Do you use metrics to measure how successful you are, or do you use them to help you achieve success?
Is it one number that is here throughout your product lifetime, or is it an ever-changing set of KPIs to give you the perspective of your business progress?
At Localazy, we changed the key metrics several times as the product and marketing evolved.
Early, we wanted to see traction and new sign-ups. We were ready to spend hours with every single user. We analyzed users and their behavior, talked to them, got feedback, and decided on several important steps to take. One of them was a kind of radical shift of the whole product.
A bit later, when no paid options were available yet, we mostly looked at "conversions" (customers reaching a certain point) and heavily optimized marketing and onboarding processes to increase numbers.
Now, we watch a lot of different financial and non-financial metrics so we can understand who and how uses our service and who is most likely to pay for it and what roadblocks are there. And, of course, we keep optimizing everything around based on our findings.
Our initial idea and the whole product have changed a lot. Partly because we listened to our users, partly because we watched KPIs, analyzed and adapted them.
Also, having money from VC, we need to keep an eye also on metrics that represent the value of our company to shareholders. Typically, MRR is an important metric, but we are more concerned about its structure, plans, expansion drivers, etc.
The metric is only important if you know what it truly means to your business - what's behind it and why you should care about it. The most crucial metric always depends on your stage and goals.
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Valuable insights I fully agree with, @vaclavhodek.
I want to add that it is equally important to choose the right KPIs in the first place. While newsletter conversions might be an important metric for one project, it might not for the other because the target group is not interested in something like this.
Very cool service! Actually, I had this on my idea list (with some minor twists) as I needed this as a developer and couldn't find anything simple and decent. I am busy with my own thing though - a small, one-man lifestyle business so haven't gotten to building it.
With my next product iteration/updates, I will give your service a try.
Greetings from a fellow Czech SW engineer/entrepreneur living abroad
I know what you mean, man. I was also looking for a suitable solution and struggled with localization for a very long time. It was so painful experience that I decided to go and fix it for myself and other devs as well :-).
Once you give it a try, drop me a line ;-).
Čau!
I will give you feedback once I try it.
I paid an agency to do the initial translations for me. It was 15 languages and a few resource file formats - XML (Android resource strings, iOS property lists), txt, RTF, ...
My main scenario for a localization service is a translation of small iterative updates (ideally from a git commit), just a few new or updated strings.
For now, I have a script that uses Google Translator API and does it for me. This is including a re-translation back to English to see if the auto-translation didn't make any straightaway stupid mistakes.
We will appreciate any feedback!
Localazy understands a lot of formats typically used for web, desktop, and mobile apps. You can even do magic like having only Android strings and seamlessly convert them to iOS .strings and .stringsdict.
We have dev-friendly tools like CLI, Github Actions, etc. so you can automate uploading and downloading. It was also important to me back then - to completely free my hands from handling files.
Once you upload your texts, you can combine everything - translate something on your own, use machine translations for pre-translating, invite your friends or even end-users or order professional human translations from us.
For professional human translations provided by our translators, you just select languages you want us to keep translated for you and that's it. As soon as there are new or updated texts, we translate them automatically (not instantly but you don't need to order anything).
Of course, Localazy also automatically informs your translators that there's something new for translating.
There is also a review process, so you can review all changes (useful for translations made by end-users) and it comes with backward machine translation - exactly as you describe it :-).
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Hey Vaclav, great post, thanks for sharing! I had never thought of it this way (which, in hindsight, isn't very smart). I have a couple of questions though:
(1) How do you know WHEN it's the right time to revise your KPIs? Do you revise them every X-number of months for example, or it is something more organic that you have to assess depending on the direction and pace at which the business knows?
(2) This one might be a bit of a strange question but here it is: do you limit the number of KPIs you measure? The reason I ask is that there are tons of different metrics you could measure, but presumably, KPIs are limited to a few "KEY" priority metrics. How do you differentiate between those that are truly "key" and those that are "nice to haves" but potentially not a priority?
Thanks!
Good questions!
1) It's not as strict as it may look from my post. It's not revolution, it's evolution.
When you start with MVP, there are just a few things that you can measure like visitors, sign-ups, etc. They are naturally your first KPIs. Over time, as there are more users, more interactions, more feedback, more features, etc., and pricing is introduced, you measure more and more different things. You start looking at new metrics and slowly stop caring about some of the old ones. It's not a radical shift. It's more like you add one new KPI and remove one old. It's also important to combine old and new ones to get perspective.
From time to time, you should revisit it and think deeply about the numbers and what they tell you about your business.
Also, it's always good to have the old metrics covered by the new ones. It helps you to find issues.
Example:
For a very long time, we watched active users and active projects. It was quite a good indicator of progress. As we shifted from single users to organizations, those two metrics become less relevant. It's an organization that pays for our service and one organization can have multiple active users and projects.
The old chain visitor->sign-up->creating project->integration (certain operation with a project)->activity, etc. was flattened to a single metric "active organizations". It later evolved into watching "purchasing organizations" only.
Of course, we still measure everything, and as soon as there is a drop in purchasing organizations we can trace the issue by going backward.
2) I already answered this above a bit. We measure everything, but on daily basis, I only check 5 key metrics and their MoM (month-on-month) changes. From time to time, I review more metrics to be sure everything is okay.
For any metric, you can ask two questions (and always relate them to the current stage of your business):
If this metric grows/declines, does it TRULY indicate that my business is doing well or that there is a potentially critical issue?
Are changes to this metric reflected in a more important metric?
In the early stages, your business is doing better if you are able to bring more visitors to your website. That's a good metric.
Later, your business is doing better if MRR is growing. It's no longer important if the number of visitors is growing as there may be actually fewer visitors but they are high-quality leads, your onboarding is perfect, etc. However, if the number of visitors starts dropping because of, e.g., the unavailability of your website in the US, you can detect that by seeing MRR growth slowing down.
Of course, if your website is not working in Laos, you may not even detect such an issue. As your business grows, it's not always possible to have perfect control over everything.
Don't forget, that there may be KPIs you use to quickly review how your business is doing in general. But for marketing, you want a different set of metrics. The number of visitors may still be a very relevant metric.
When we were improving onboarding, we focus on additional metrics like "number of support requests".
This is so helpful Vaclav! I've literally saved all of your feedback into a working document of learnings I keep - like my own self-made workbook of Indie Hacking Things to Remember.
Also, what you mentioned about "As your business grows, it's not always possible to have perfect control over everything" is a learning I need to interiorize a little more. I like to have control over things and know what's going on all the time, so I definitely need to learn to let go and embrace uncertainty a little more.
Two more cents...
“Oftentimes, in order to do the big things, you have to let the small bad things happen.” [Tim Ferris]