Growth metrics for your pre-beta startup in 2 hours

Published in

Curie app

7 min readMar 7, 2016

How do you know that you’re doing the right thing to grow your startup when you didn’t even start beta test your product?

That was an issue that we have struggled with for some time now. OK, there are page visits that Google Analytics give, so that’s a starting point. But do you know how those visits convert to email subscribers or beta users that want to test your product?

Here’s how we used Visible.vc and Maitre to convert our visitors into beta users and mesure how we’re doing.

Chose the right tools

Let’s take a look at our setup. Besides Google Analytics, Mailchimp and Google Spreadsheet that you probably know, these are two important tools that we’ve used:

Maitre — is a signup form that creates a waiting list and presents your subscribers at which place they are in the line. They can share the fact that they’ve signed up in order to gain a higher position in the waiting list. The first time I saw Matire I knew that using their form for gathering beta user signups will help us gain traction. And it’s doing really well at the moment, especially that we don’t have a lot of visitors in the beginning. The conversion rate for us at the moment is about 11%, which is really nice.

Visible.vc — I was one of the first beta users and I must admit it was hard to get your head around and setup every metric. Now, after a couple of months and significant changes in the metric creation process, the tool is really nice to use and gives you a lot of possibilities to configure your metrics. You can integrate Google Analytics, Xero, Stripe, add your data manually, and easily visualize them for others. There’s also a ‘update’ option that allows to pitch to investors and update them on your progress. In general a great tool for visualizing your progress.

What to measure

Probably at the really early stage of your startup you don’t have a lot of things that you can measure. We at Curie actually don’t have any beta users, as the app is still in development. So there’s no Customer Lifetime Value, Active users, Customer Acquisition Cost (we could actually calculate that, but we have practically no costs at the moment, so it doesn’t provide any value for us) or Monthly Recurring Revenue.

Still, there are some touchpoints that we can measure and improve:

Google Analytics

As probably everyone else, we have Google Analytics setup, to check for:

Visitors — the amount of unique people visiting our landing page www.curie.me.

Visits — the amount of visits per unique visitor for each day. So for example, a user could visit our page multiple times per day.

Page views — the amount of page viewed per day.

Google Analytics allow to follow a lot of other things you can analyze, but for our general overview that’s more than enough at this point. We don’t want to overcomplicate our metrics dashboard.

Email sign ups

We are using Mailchimp for our email campaigns, to cumulate everyone that wants to sign up for our newsletter and for the beta test itself. So we’re using 4 separate lists at the moment, one for the newsletter signup, one for the beta test signup, and two identical ones for the Polish market. In case of signups we measure:

Newsletter signups per week — how many people signed up in each week compared to other weeks. This allows us to see how our marketing efforts are performing, especially our blog.

Newsletter signups in total — the total number of people signed up for all newsletters.

Beta test

Maitre is used on our main signup form. It does a good job with showing you how many others also signed up, and at which position you’re currently. There’s also the option to share to social networks, to improve your position, so actually it has viral growth build in.

You can integrate it with Mailchimp and store all subscribers there, or just export them in a csv file. The wordpress plugin allows to easily integrate it with our landing page.

We’re measuring:

Beta test signups per week — how many people signed up for our beta list in the given week.

Beta test signups in total — how many people signed up in total.

Bonus

Based on the email campaigns that we’re sending out we can check how many people opened each email, and how many of those actually converted to our landing page. This is all done in Mailchimp automatically. Our dashboard enables to just better visualize it, and forecast future campaign success after more data is imputed.

Our setup

How do we get everything presented in Visible.vc? For Google Analytics it’s easy. You just integrate your account with it, on the dashboard select ‘+Create Chart’, and chose all Google Analytics metrics. You can change in which timeframe each metric should be displayed. I prefer to see it on a daily basis. On the options tab there’s the possibility to change the chart type to your convenience. Just press ‘Save’ and you’re ready to go.

Beta testers and email signups

From here on it gets a little bit more tricky, as you have to enter your data and setup metrics manually. I’ve used Google Spreadsheets for this. So I’ve gathered all signups based on each week. Each column adds signups from the last one, so I know what the total number of subscribers is from all newsletter lists. There is also a ‘Difference’ row, that tells me, what’s the difference in subscribers between the previous week and the last one. This allows me to actually measure, if we’re improving or not, and what result our growth experiments create.

So we have that data ready and easy to update for future weeks. Based on that sheet you can implement each metric.

Adding a new metric

We need to add that data now to Visible.vc. You can do that by going to ‘Data’ -> ‘+Add Metric’. Add your metric name, unit and format. Don’t forget to select how often you should update the data, as changing it later will delete previous entries! For email and beta test signups I’m using a weekly update, which is not to often and not too seldom.

We actually need to add two charts here. The first one presents how many users are joining per week. Each data entry is represented by the number of users who signed up in the giving week. Just add the data from the Google Spreadsheet manually. I’m updating the data every Monday, once the numbers are in. When you’re done, go to your dashboard and select ‘+Create Chart’. Here you have to select the metric from the dropdown list and select the timeframe. After that do to the ‘Options’ tab and select the ‘Column’ type, for a good overview.

The second chart presents the total amount of beta testers. In this case repeat all steps described above and just change chart type to ‘Number’ to show the total amount of beta test subscribers. Don’t forget to select the metric ‘Total beta testers’ and not the ‘Weekly beta test signups’ metric.

Don’t forget all metrics

So I’ve described how to add Google Analytics data, and beta signups. Now just add newsletter signups and data from Mailchimp about how your email campaigns perform.

Updating the list

It actually takes me about 5–10 minutes to update the list on each Monday. So not a long time in order to present to your team how you’re performing, and motivate them to push even more.