This is partly a continuation post of our Stop Measuring Everything post last week.

Metrics and what we measure are powerful and dangerous. Data and metrics are noise, what happens when you overreact to noise? Poor metrics can kill an early stage company. We can’t mathematize startups and focus solely on the known while ignoring the unknown. It’s that unknown that could be your difference maker. If there was a metric for creating successful startups, we’d all be doing it.

“Frequent access to information can be harmful“, Antifragile

In some ways, early stage metrics remind me of codebase optimization. In software projects, I believe code should be optimized as a last resort. It’s a waste of time and engineering dollars to optimize a codebase before you know what you’re building. Is that permission to write crappy code and ignore the optimizations that will come later? Of course not, but you can’t make x better until you know what x is.

To clarify, my target here is single founders and small teams working on early stage products. As Mike says in the previous post, when team’s grow and a business becomes a business then metrics play a massive role in communications across your team, your investors and even your customers. Here I’m speaking in reference to early stage, product-market fit stages.

I also recognize that, as with pro sports, all the various startup nerds around startups crave their stats. Depending on who’s involved in supporting your venture, you may have no choice but to deliver your fantasy stats to your funders, government etc as they play armchair QB with you.

So, build great metrics and make sure you learn from the best but consider adopting metrics later, or metric procrastination, as a principle. Books like Alistair and Ben’s will help you pick a small set of metrics well and ignore the useless noisy ones. Make sure to limit your metrics to a finite set, ie drop some as you add more and build a real business before you worry too much about formalizing it’s metrics.

PS. I’ll be at Alistair’s Lean Analytics event in Toronto next week. If anyone wants to talk Startupify.Me or trains, let me know or just say hi?