Imvu products biz software our screenie serial#
Imvu products biz software our screenie code#

Human beings have an unfortunate bias to take credit for positive results and pass the blame for negative results. Unfortunately, the same mental trickery doesn’t apply when the numbers come back down. In many cases the fluctuations are random or caused by unrelated external events. So the product guys think it’s the new feature, the sales guys think it’s that new promotion - I’ve even seen customer service reps be convinced it’s due to a new customer-friendly policy. In fact, I’ve noticed that people tend to believe that whatever they were working on that preceded the metrics improvement probably caused the improvement itself.

Everyone involved with that product celebrates. The company launches a new feature or new product, and a few days later, traffic (or revenue, or customers) starts going up. That makes sense, since they are the easiest to measure and they tend to make you feel good about yourself.įor example, here’s a pattern I’ve witnessed in companies large and small. Unfortunately, most analytics packages are configured by default to provide mostly reports on vanity metrics. Think of all the decisions you can make: obviously, roll out the feature to 100% of your customers continue to experiment with more features like this one and realize that you’ve probably learned something that’s particular valuable to your customers. A few days later, you take a look at the revenue you’ve earned from each set of customers, noticing that group B has 20% higher revenue per-customer. Imagine you add a new feature to your website, and you do it using an A/B split-test in which 50% of customers see the new feature and the other 50% don’t. Now consider the case of an Actionable Metric. Now what? Do you really know what actions you took in the past that drove those visitors to you, and do you really know which actions to take next? In most cases, I don’t think it’s very helpful. Consider the most basic of all reports: the total number of “hits” to your website. When you hear companies doing PR about the billions of messages sent using their product, or the total GDP of their economy, think vanity metrics. They might make you feel good, but they don’t offer clear guidance for what to do. Unfortunately, the majority of data available in off-the-shelf analytics packages are what I call Vanity Metrics. The only metrics that entrepreneurs should invest energy in collecting are those that help them make decisions. IMVU learned to test their assumptions instead of executing them as if they were passed down from God.Įnter Eric Ries… Vanity Metrics vs. They used customer development and agile software development to eventually discover customers who would pay for 3D animated chat software ($10M in revenue in 2007).

Imvu products biz software our screenie code#

They threw away their first product (40,000 lines of code that implemented an IM add-on) as they learned customers didn’t want it.

IMVU learned its way to product/market fit. Here is just one business-changing example, taken from the outstanding “How IMVU Learned its way to $10M a year” on Venture Hacks… How do you get to $1,000,000 per month in sales? By testing the right things. Eric is also a venture advisor to Kleiner Perkins. He was most recently co-founder and CTO of IMVU, which has more than 20 million registered users and generates $1,000,000+ in revenue per month.

Imvu products biz software our screenie serial#

This is a guest post by serial entrepreneur Eric Ries. Vanity metrics: good for feeling awesome, bad for action.