Learning Start-up KPIs: Weekly Update #3
This marks the end of the third week of this month’s project. I’ve been spending this month so far taking a few different approaches to learning everything I can about KPIs and startup analytics. You can view my starting project outline here, or check out the prior week update here. Stay tuned for my final update!
What I Set Out to Accomplish
As I mentioned in my update last week, I had to make some adjustments to my plans this week. At the start of this week, my goals were to:
- complete another write-up on what I’ve learned about KPIs so far
- write a blog post about my level of success cold emailing/networking
- record a tutorial video on Google Analytics
- learn how to use Tableau
- record a video tutorial on Tableau
What I Actually Accomplished
Unfortunately, my lag from the first two weeks was still persistent in this week as well. I ran into a few hang-ups learning and creating a tutorial on Google Analytics, and I settled on a more general how-to post instead. As a result, I did not spend as much time as planned on learning Tableau, so I decided to postpone my video tutorial on it until I’m at a more comfortable level with it.
I reviewed my efforts around networking on LinkedIn and summarized what I learned a short guide. I wrote it with the hope of helping anyone who might be looking to do the same thing. You can check it out here.
As planned, I also wrote another blog post on the content I’ve been studying, although it isn’t exactly what I had originally planned. Here’s the cheat sheet I created as a reference for startup metrics.
What I Learned This Week
Here are my top takeaways from this week:
- Not getting a reply on LinkedIn can be discouraging, but you can make it a learning opportunity and try following-up later. I did find that I got more responses from people that I shared something/connection in common with, and when I had a more specific ‘ask’ of them.
- Learning a software tool takes time! I have quickly realized that allowing one week per tool was not adequate for how deep I wanted to go on each one.
- Using Notion for notetaking is a great way to quickly re-organize notes into drafts and outlines.
Skills I Used
- Project Management in Trello
- Note-taking and Drafting in Notion
- Teaching via writing
- video documentation
- Self-teaching a tech tool
Plans for Next Week
As I mentioned earlier, I’ve realized that one of my hangups with the tech tools I wanted to learn is that they simply require more time than I can dedicate to them right now. I still plan to do my best to create video tutorials for Tableau and Excel this week, but they will likely be more surface level.
I will also be writing at least three additional blog posts summarizing and demonstrating what I have learned this month. Along with my fourth update post, I will also create a landing page for this project on Medium for easy navigation.