Adora Cheung - How to Set KPIs and Goals

YC Partner Adora Cheung covers the importance of defining and tracking KPIs to understand how effectively your startup is reaching your goals.
Transcript and lecture slides here: www.ycombinator.com/library/6...
This lecture is part of YC's Startup School, a free online program and global community of founders. Register and join the community at www.startupschool.org/
Timestamps
00:00 What is a Key Performance Indicator (KPI)?
00:39 Why do KPIs matter?
1:33 What are the right KPIs to set?
1:46 Setting your primary metric
2:22 What are the characteristics of a good primary metric?
5:32 The two best primary metrics
6:50 When should you consider active users as a metric?
9:20 KPIs for bio and hardtech businesses
11:15 Secondary metrics
12:56 The best KPI for an unlaunched company
13:55 Setting metric-based goals
15:20 How fast should I grow?
17:15 What does success look like for you?
17:40 Guidelines for defining a goal
19:45 How to pick a goal
20:44 Tracking Progress
21:18 Leveraging your primary goal
22:27 Using the Startup School weekly update

[@chan90s]

I started realizing the true value of these videos only after I started taking notes

[@chlq35]

"I urge you to just get paid." hahahah! Great tip.

[@Sondre7]

This was a great video! Loved especially the stuff sourced from PG, really managed to get the essence of the knowledge there

[@PreeMarket]

Great breakdown, thanks for the video!

[@domore1287]

Wow that was mind blowing-Powerful

[@duncanhaywood4624]

Great Lecture. Thank you Adora!

[@MrRehor]

Thank you so much for sharing this video. It kept my interest and It is very clear. Awesome!!!

[@alpineai]

This along with Michael's article "The Scientific Method for Startups" should be required for university curriculum.

[@tarunommadan]

Thank you Adora for this video 🙏.

[@rajinderyadav9250]

Adora did a great job on this talk, found this very useful even though I am still in the idea / user acquisition phase.

[@maltejohnsson8578]

@Crebs Park That's right, I still consider that a considerable achievment, and I for sure believe you can find people less merited to talk about goals and KPI's here on KZbin. Please try to broaden your horizon and try and judge a book by it's contents, as well as maybe being less judgemental and critical about the cover of it.

[@fh485]

Very informative - thank you

[@strategysprints]

Brilliant!

[@dvabhil]

wow wat a informative video

[@nuruhusseinmohammed4140]

wow, incredible! 👏👏

[@andu896]

Adora, thanks!

[@SUPERRITA0830]

Amazon was intentionally not trying to make any money at the early stage so that they can more market share. Obviously it worked well for them. I think whether CAC should be less than your revenue depends on your industry.

[@kamenpetkov8179]

You are not Amazon. She is talking about the right way of doing things in the general case. Obviously, there will be some outliers like Amazon.

[@ahseyadomado5759]

Great content

[@evelinherrera3602]

Really useful. Thanks!

[@iq-beat7998]

Adora thank you 👍

[@lijupillai3215]

What are some of the best tools out there to track these KPIs , other than say Google Sheets ?

[@mayurpanchal7680]

Adora is so adorable ❤

[@omarowaidani5266]

Very useful

[@Math_kru_earng]

thank a lot!

[@herr-robot279]

Great!

[@frankhopper8316]

Is there a link to the consumer metrics lecture Auda mentions at 12:26?

[@NickSinai3]

Also looking for this

[@ffabiang]

Also looked for this but could not find them

[@andrewkiminhwan]

What are the most common patterns of obstacles for hitting goals? other than say not trying hard enough, not solving a big enough problem, not knowing enough about your users, poorly design checkout, etc.

[@BiancaAguglia]

Other than the reasons you mentioned (which are all valid), other obstacles are: - not enough cash to hire the right team (this can be overcome with enough ingenuity 😊) - not enough marketing or wrong marketing strategy - wrong price or wrong monetization strategy - not enough willingness to pivot based on feedback from users - not enough A/B testing or testing insignificant, least impactful features - conflict within the team and not enough maturity to deal with it in a constructive way. Some of those obstacles I experienced personally, some I learned of from other people's stories. I'm a one-person operation 😊 because I don't have the right personality to scale a business in terms of team members.

[@mitchynz]

Ive been through 2 startup accelerators (YC wannabes, lol) and the reason we failed to hit our numbers, and (anecdotally) 9/10 of the tech startups did the same - We spent all our time building the product, and 0 time speaking to Customers. So we got to demo day with an MVP that wasn't the right fit because we weren't solving real problems, just guessed ones... it's really goddamn hard to talk to Customers before the products ready to demo, but yeah, I just stamp it on my forehead now - "gotta validate yo"

[@orionNsirius]

@@mitchynz In YC, there are only two things you need to do. Build the product and talk to users

[@yongkangchia1993]

@@mitchynz thanks for the insightful experience

[@astrarai-thesobercoder]

@Mitch thank you for sharing.

[@LDacic]

Lecture slides aren't available in your library. Is there another way to access them? Thanks!

[@murtazakhanafridi1737]

Thanks

[@brittnayjohnson5982]

#BUS25F42 This question makes so much sense.

[@jesset55]

I'm looking for a generic template/worksheet of some sort to help with weekly goal setting. Does anyone use anything like that?

[@thorgexyz]

check out the one used at YCs startup school www.startupschool.org/dashboard

[@stephanielockett7541]

nice.

[@andychen5571]

The 4 points about primary metrics are really confused by her explanation

[@Knowledge_Nuggies]

@16:00 ...growth of what? Weekly revenue? Daily active users of that week? Newly acquired users of that week? Ugh...

[@silasadedoyin4733]

This video appears to be having some issues.

[@qbakuba2057]

So let me get this straight: If company doesnt grow at least 22% per month ycombinator is not interested?

[@RohitKumar-vw3lh]

8:45

[@YourAliasIsNotAvailable]

Yay, there is this person whos company closed due to the lack of ability to maintain profitability, teaching me how to name factors to ensure my profitability. So exciting. I like how all this people talk about key indicators as they could grow infinite. You know, by no possibilty you are able to get more than 100% market share and even this is theoratically impossible. There isn't such a thing like infinite growth, so at one point there is no meaning in pushing your predicted numbers.

[@TheRamstoss]

Majority of startups fail, doesn't mean her next one won't succeed. She founded a company, raised 40 million dollars, and is a partner at Y Combinator. What have you done?

[@YourAliasIsNotAvailable]

@@TheRamstoss I'm vice president of a company which didn't went down the drain...

[@TheRamstoss]

​@@YourAliasIsNotAvailable It's "which didn't go* down the drain" not "didn't went down the drain". And that's awesome. Did you get there by having people offer you free help, choose to spend time to take that help even though no one forced you to, then being negative about it?

[@StephaneArcher]

Why do you need Goals? What about just do your best to push up your KPIs? 🤔

[@ajaym8039]

This video is sponsored by Doblet 😝

[@novapowell6976]

Is this a person who burned $38 million and failed with Homejoy?

[@AkireMaru]

So…when’s the last time you raised $38 million

[@joshau2346]

boring