The Importance of Metrics

One of my many take-aways from Raindance was the importance of collecting statistics, figuring out which ones matter to the business, and then tracking them. Early on at Raindance we decided that conferencing minutes in a day was a critical statistic to manage the business by. This was a good statistic, even after we went public because we could communicate it to the employees without disclosing revenue (Sarbanes Oxley you know). We put a giant tote-board in the main stairwell of the building so everyone knew how many minutes we had supported in real-time.

To get employees pumped up we started having what we called Doubling Parties. Every time our minutes in a day would double we would have a party, and do some shots to commemorate the historic event. I believe the first party was sometime in 1998 where we celebrated 25,000 minutes in a single day. Over the next 8 years we had parties at 50K, 100K, 250K (wanted to keep the drunken math straight), 500K, 1M, 2M, and 4M.. The 4M minute party happened shortly before I left the company which was a nice little going away.  As I recall the minutes would double at fairly linear intervals, like a good startup should.

Well it wasn’t a double, but it was significant that yesterday the crew at Raindance crossed the 5M minute a day threshold.

This photo was taken just seconds before the historic event. The people at Raindance are first class and should be proud of their accomplishment. It’s not easy to build a company that can handle that kind of traffic day-in and day-out, 24x7.

Here at Lijit, we have been tracking our statistics since the beginning. At first it was hard to find the data for the noise as will happen early on. Now, some interesting trends are starting to develop that I will share in upcoming posts. It has become clear however that the major number we can control is "wijit" views. This is the number of times a search box is presented to a person on a web property of some sort. In order to ramp things as fast as possible we did the Feedburner partnership to get as much exposure as we could. 

Between our own organic growth and Feedburner, we currently present a search ‘opportunity’ over a million times a week across the Internet. That’s pretty cool.

Still figuring out the shot metric!

Comments

[You Mon Tsang]

That metrics board is awesome. I would love to put one up for my company. Do you know how you put it together?