Optimize Metrics vs. Follow Mission

Eppo does all that and more. Delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover. Eppo lets you go beyond basic clickthrough metrics and instead uses our north star metrics like activation, retention, subscriptions and payments.

Crystal Widjaja Yes. Please find me at crystalwidjaja.com. You can reach out to me and my email is there. Listeners, please do instrumentation correctly. Please don't track your KPIs. Please track your user journeys and experiences. We'll have much funner things to talk about if you do that.

So everybody has that shared sense. What is the north star metric is something that we do. The second thing that we do is that we have kind of loose quarterly OKR. So like, "Okay, if we believe that, what do we need to do next quarter to actually put ourselves on a path to that?" And then from there, teams are operating in squads and they'...

I think why we're seeing the rise of post-training happen is just that the models themselves are so powerful. As of this year, Nathan Lambert did this study that I thought was pretty interesting of all the top leader boards and it showed that once a model hits 30 billion parameters, the CapEx to actually train a model and put billions of t...

When I was at Airbnb, one of the things that I loved about our experimentation platform was being able to easily slice results by device, by country, and by user stage. Eppo does all that and more, delivering results quickly, avoiding annoying prolonged analytics cycles, and helping you easily get to the root cause of any issue you discover.

I think about it a little bit, depending on the type of job you have and the types of customers you have. The more scale you have tends to be you have less sophisticated customers because you're generally like a consumer thing where the customers are rational. They're not experts. That's generally where you just try things.

And similarly with paid marketing, as you generate contribution margin, you can reinvest that and grow and actually if you link those two up explicitly, it makes it really clear why thinking about something like payback period is a much better measure of paid marketing performance than LTV to CAC because the speed at which you get enough money back...

I mean the first time this was very eye-opening to me and probably the first one I built was the one we built at Thumbtack in partnership with our finance team, and it made it so immediately obvious that we were exceptionally sensitive to the repeat rate of new customers. If you think about Thumbtack, we offered a thousand categories.

Time to value need to be relatively short or you can figure out a way to make it short. And then do you have a lot of potentially end user S&B business? They are interested in the solution. They want to try that out. If you do not have both, if you for example, develop a software for the [inaudible 00:18:42]. Companies like [inaudible 00:18:44].

And then you need to have an experimentation tool because, like I said, you cannot just imagine you build everything and everything works perfectly. So you need either like Optimizely, I know Amplitude has some experimentation components. Eppo is a new and upcoming one. You need some tool to allow you to do experimentation.

Where basically the organization is trying to deliver as much value as it can to the market and to capture as much value back, and by creating a feedback loop between these two you are actually able to grow very fast.

So the North Star metric is measuring how much value we're creating for the user, the core value that they're getting. In this case this is some productivity suite, so this is number of documents created per month for example. Because we think that every document created maybe it's a small document, I don't know.

Jason Lemkin As you can see, I have a lot of opinions on things here that are data-driven and they're live experience. This one, I need another year in the oven, and I'll tell you why. I'll tell you why. What happened in the last 18 months is, in customer success, which is, in the old days, it was related to product.

The second one, and this is going to sound a little silly, but I am not exaggerating, it works. If you are a CEO founder and you have that title on LinkedIn, it's amazing the responses you'll get. So we made this list and we just started to send connection requests to the CEOs or CPOs or CFOs on our target list, and said something as simple as this...

The scaler is saying, okay, now how do I find leverage? How do I have 10X more account execs or how to get other people to sell for me? They're all going to be called VP of sales or chief revenue officer. They're completely different archetypes, and that same person exists in engineering and in product, et cetera.