Metrics & Analytics

“I have seen companies shift their curve outward by 10, 15, 20 percentage points from making those changes, especially when you consider that churn is most likely to happen in the very earliest usage of the product. If you can get people past that hump, it's a really invaluable part of the product to work on.”

“Our impact and our business goals are in service of our mission, which is to seek the truth and help people understand the world, not the other way around. That means that impact for us is growing subscribers, but it's also when a deeply reported story triggers an important policy change or a new law.”

“If you give everyone the same goal like 'go get GMV', it leads to what I call toddler soccer, where everybody just runs to the same surface or the same customer set. Everyone's tripping on each other, nobody really gets contact on the ball, there's no coordination.”

“There is no such thing as a long feedback loop. You can make a decision about how long the feedback loop is. The way you choose to shorten the feedback loop is to say, what are the things that are correlated with the outcome that I eventually desire?”

“This way is thinking about a cohort of users we acquire in a given time period, say a quarter. And then over the next year, two years, three years, four years, five years, how much GMV have those merchants produced in total? Not about per merchant basis, but in total, did that cohort generate GMV?”

“Liquidity is how marketplaces win. It's this measure of your ability to match buyers and sellers efficiently, it's how quickly and efficiently people can find what they're looking for on your platform. It's literally at the center of your vision, it's why you exist as a marketplace is to connect the two.”

“The fitness function was not a good idea. This is a compound metric where you try to take several important metrics and munge them into one. The problem is it becomes totally meaningless. When you're measuring things, you're trying to understand what actions create the good outputs. By putting them all together, you obfuscate that.”

“I've never seen a product be successful that used metrics as a driver for what they were doing. I've seen a lot of companies be really successfully seeing metrics as a consequence and a way to evaluate the quality of their decisions, and then using those to triangulate and make better decisions moving forward.”