Lean Analytics

Lean Analytics opens up the world of collecting and analyzing data to new entrepreneurs, by showing them how to use data as a powerful tool without getting consumed by it to build, launch and grow their startup faster while focusing on the right metrics.

Unless you’ve taken a lot of statistics classes in school or college, you might not even have come across data as a tool that much until this point. Sure, it’s part of predicting election outcomes based on political polls in the paper and you know that Facebook and Google are “after your data” but when it comes to business, what is it for?

When it comes to creating a company, data is really just all vital, numerical information that describes your business.

Every business collects and amasses hundreds of kinds of data in its lifetime. These are called metrics and for each metric you in turn gain thousands of so-called data points (that is specific values) over time – for example there’s a session, user and page view count for every single day on Four Minute Books.

Without data, any good entrepreneur will lie to themselves about how good their business really is – they have to! However, when self-belief turns into delusion, that’s no good. Successfully building a company comes down to finding the golden middle between believing in your dream and building something the world actually needs – and data is the balancing pole that lets you walk on this tightrope.

Data is the antidote to delusion, making sure your feet are planted firmly on the ground of reality.

That said, that’s also all it is.

Experts often talk about “data-driven strategies,” but you don’t really want to be data-driven. Think about the meaning of the word. If your business was a car, would you let data take the driver’s seat? Of course not. Data should be in the passenger seat, with you driving and making the decisions. Therefore, you want to be data-informed, but not let data make your decisions for you.

Describing the life cycle of companies in stages of mental models has become a popular approach and can help you understand how a business must transform over its lifetime. For example, People Over Profit discusses four stages of honesty and deceit that can corrupt a business, while Predictable Success describes a five-stage sink-or-swim model to tell failed companies from prosperous ones. Lean Analytics has its own model too, and it describes five clear-cut stages startups must move through: Empathy. This is where you connect with other people to determine a real problem that they have, which you can solve. Stickiness. Where you figure out how to efficiently solve that problem in…