Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster

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"O'Reilly Media, Inc.", Apr 15, 2013 - Business & Economics - 409 pages

If you’re involved with a startup, analytics help you find your way to the right product and market before the money runs out. But with a flood of information available, where do you start? This book shows you what to measure, how to analyze it, and how to report it, whether you’re evaluating your business model, testing new features, enticing investors, or reporting progress to advisers.

Written by Alistair Croll (founder of Coradiant) and Ben Yoskovitz (co-founder of Year One Labs), Lean Analytics lays out practical, proven steps to take your startup from initial idea to product/market fit and beyond. Examples and case studies show entrepreneurs and intrapreneneurs (entrepreneurs inside larger organizations) how to identify and measure a startup’s single most important metric, and how to iterate until you get it right.

While the authors primarily cover technology startups, their lessons can be applied far beyond the Web. Even traditional businesses are embracing a lean, learn-first approach, as demonstrated by owners of a San Francisco deli that used a temporary "pop-up" method to optimize their menu and operations before launching a permanent restaurant.

 

Contents

Stop Lying to Yourself
1
Finding the Right Metric for Right Now
43
Lines in the Sand
271
Putting Lean Analytics to Work
351

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About the author (2013)

Alistair Croll has been an entrepreneur, author, and public speaker for nearly 20 years. He's worked on a variety of topics, from web performance, to big data, to cloud computing, to startups, in that time. In 2001, he co-founded web performance startup Coradiant, and since that time has also launched Rednod, CloudOps, Bitcurrent, Year One Labs, the Bitnorth conference, the International Startup Festival and several other early-stage companies. Alistair is the author of three books on web performance, analytics, and IT operations, including "Lean Analytics" http: //leananalyticsbook.com/, a book on using data to build a better business faster that's due out in March from O'Reilly Media. He lives in Montreal, Canada and tries to mitigate chronic ADD by writing about far too many things at "Solve For Interesting" http: //www.solveforinteresting.com. Alistair chairs O'Reilly's Strata Conference. Benjamin Yoskovitz is a serial entrepreneur with over 15 years of experience in web businesses. The co-founder of Standout Jobs and Year One Labs, he is also an active mentor to numerous startups and startup accelerators. Ben is the author of "Instigator Blog" (instigatorblog.com), and regularly speaks at startup conferences. He's currently VP Product at GoInstant, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2012.