How to Set Goals for Your Start Ups

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Growth is a little hard to grock, but if you look at this chart, you'll see that how small variations in weekly growth rates can make a huge difference on the monthly and yearly time horizon. To get big fast, it actually seems duable if you have something people want. On the flip side, if you can only manage one % a weekly growth, it's a sign you haven't figured out things yet. You're gong to get very ancy about launching, ah, very quickly.

We've cut down the second week of lectures to be even shorter and combined them into one podcast.

First, a lecture from Michael Seibel. Michael is CEO and a partner at YC. His lecture is about How to Plan an MVP.

Then, a lecture from Adora Cheung. Adora is a YC partner and a cofounder of Homejoy. Her lecture is about How to Set KPIs and Goals.

Last, a lecture from Ilya Volodarsky. Ilya is a cofounder of Segment. His lecture is about Analytics for Startups.

Y Combinator invests a small amount of money ($150k) in a large number of startups (recently 200), twice a year.

Learn more about YC and apply for funding here: https://www.ycombinator.com/apply/

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Topics

00:00 - Intro

00:43 - Michael Seibel - How to Plan an MVP

1:25 - The goal of a pre-launch startup

3:10 - Iterating vs pivoting

3:59 - Lean MVP

5:06 - Heavy MVP

6:19 - Launching

7:35 - Learning is easier with an MVP

8:07 - How to build an MVP quickly

10:17 - Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals

11:51 - What are the right KPIs to set?

15:50 - Revenue or active users

16:28 - Why choose active users?

18:55 - Biotech or hardtech KPIs

20:25 - Secondary metric

21:25 - What if you haven't launched?

22:20 - Setting goals

23:47 - How fast should you grow?

25:13 - Defining your own goals

28:40 - Tracking progress

30:27 - Ilya Volodarsky - Analytics for Startups

30:46 - Why analytics?

31:36 - Funnel

32:51 - Collecting data, analytics, and data flow

34:16 - Metric - Signups per week

35:28 - Metric - Retention cohorts

36:30 - Which metric to pick?

36:57 - Have I reached product market fit?

37:27 - Metric - Revenue

37:51 - Dashboards

38:35 - Advisor updates

39:01 - The startup stack

42:13 - Recommendations for the MVP process