Growth of a Web App: Goals, Metrics, & Rewards
- February 22nd, 2007 /
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With siteMighty recently launched into open beta, Blake and I are currently working through setting our goals for the growth of siteMighty. As excited as we are about the launch, all our focusup to now has been getting ourselves to this point. This means the point that we have a web app that works, can charge credit cards, and most importantly helps our customers run successful businesses.
Well, guess what, here we are! So pop the champagne right? Yeah, well, that’s what we did last week, and now it’s on to the customer acquisition process. In reality, we have reached the starting line.
So, this morning we set about planning the next phase of siteMighty: the growth phase.
We are working together to define what our success factors are. We are doing that by:
- Setting Goals – We built a pro-forma six months ago with projections for growth once we launched siteMighty. The truth is we know a lot more about it now, including everything we’ve learned from our beta users thus far. It’s time to revisit our pro-forma. We are setting stretch goals (attainable goals that you have to really strive to reach) for the next four months. Each month we will be measuring our success in hitting those goals.
- Defining Metrics – Our goals are tied to the metrics we are determining for ourselves. You can’t measure something unless you’ve defined it. We will be setting goals and measuring two things: 1) Number of signups 2) Number of paid accounts. We’re limiting ourselves to these two metrics for right now because we don’t have a feel for how our metrics will start to break down, so this early in the game we’re not going to worry about what account level those paid accounts are on. We are also going to be using the 5% conversion rule of thumb to start which is higher than what we extrapolated for Basecamp and Dropsend.
- Creating Rewards – The best way to motivate everyone to work towards the goals is to create an incentive system that aligns their compensation with the business goals of the company. That is exactly what we will be doing with siteMighty. This can be done through sales commissions, quarterly bonuses, etc. We are creating a reward system that will incentivize and reward growth based on the metrics that we have defined for ourselves.
As we deploy this system, we’ll keep you apprised of its success. We’d love to hear your thoughts on this system and any other ideas for creating incentive systems to drive growth. The important thing here is for us to understand that just having launched siteMighty gets us into the ballgame, now its time for us to hit the homerun!
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- categories: All, SiteMighty /
