Michael Seibel explains why metrics are so important and how to set them up correctly

The next is how to set up metrics. How many of you are using Google Analytics as your primary metrics products? Raise your hand. Okay, you are doing it wrong. Yes. So setting a metrics is something that's like super important very early in your company because it's how you know whether your product is being used or not. And it's one of the number one sources of new product ideas and inspiration. So Google Analytics, I would say is a great product for knowing how many people came to your website today and how many pages they viewed which used to be relevant and is not really relevant anymore and where they came from. What it's not a great product for is identifying what people's actions were when they were using your product. Did they click this button? Did they see this screen? How long were they on the page for before they did something else? Did they leave something in their cart? For all of those things you want an events based metrics product. Mixpanel Amplitude Heap. I think we've funded like 50 of them. There are like a hundred of them out there. You should be using one of them. If you're not, you can't be sophisticated at building your product. This is just kind of a prerequisite. So get on it. And this goes back to the early thing that I mentioned, which is technical teams. For a technical team, implementing Mixpanel is ridiculously easy. For a non technical team, it's basically impossible. This is just one of the many advantages of having a highly technical team. You actually know what your users are doing. Without this, you're just missing a huge part of what you need to know the next thing. And Suhail from Mixpanel gave a great talk about how do you set up Mixpanel? One of the challenges of setting up Mixpanel is the second that you're sitting there saying I want to track what my users are doing, you can come up with like 150 things your users can do with your product and you want to track all of them. That's often a mistake. If your analytics product has got too many analytics in it in the beginning, it will be hard to use. And part of what you're doing if you've never used product like Mixpanel before is learning how to use it and most importantly, teaching your employees and your co founders how to use it. Because this product should be a product that everyone in your company understands how to use is. Everyone in your company should understand how the product is functioning. This is not something that like the CTO uses and creates reports from this is interactive product that everyone can use. So to start, pick 5 to 10 simple stats. Let's take Instagram as an example, right? If I were to pick 5 to 10 simple stats for Instagram, let's say opened the app, created an account, took a photo, applied any effects, share the photo. That's probably all I need in the beginning, right? I mean, the number one mechanism for Instagram is taking a photo and sharing it. I can track that. I'm pretty happy. The other thing that I will warn you about is that if your product is good, the naming conventions for these stats are going to become very important because one day there will be 100 or even a thousand stats you track. So think a little bit ahead of time and don't name something stat, something that only you'll understand. Make sure that you, if your company's good, many, many people have to look at these stats. Make measurement a part of your product spec. Oftentimes when I talk to founders, they say, we built it on this release and we'll add the measurement some point in the future. I don't understand how that works. You build something you want people to use, but you're not incorporating the measurement that tells you whether people are using it. That doesn't work. Um, building measurement is part of a product spec. So when you spec out a product, you better spec the stats you expect to be tracking. And you should also spec the stats that you think are going to improve when you're building that product. That should be part of the spec. It should be part of the first release. Otherwise you're flying blind. And this is just countless times adjusting tv. This has screwed us.