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by xiaoma 3367 days ago
I see there's now an update form in the MOOC now. It has four fields—metric, value, growth and notes. Are there any pages on the site offering guidance on how to get the most out of the MOOC?

In what cases should the primary metric be "other"?
1 comments
compumike 3367 days ago
(Advisor for #group87 here!)

You should talk to your advisor (possibly one-on-one) about selecting the right metrics. Many groups are not focused on the right things at the moment, and that's OK but something we should talk about and fix!

If you have revenue>0, you probably want it to be revenue. Similarly, if you have revenue==0 && users>0, you probably want it to be active users. (Not cumulative registered users, but daily or weekly actives, for example.) You should probably only be using "other" if those two don't apply.

Think of it this way: at the end of the 10 weeks, what metric will you really care about showing 10 weeks of growth in? For example, having 10X-ed your revenue is much more impressive than 10X daily active users, which itself is much more impressive than 10X people manually seeing a demo of your prototype!

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xiaoma 3367 days ago
Unfortunately I wasn't selected, which is why I've asked here. I know I had some poor focuses in the past (e.g. trying to do a collaboration with an offline business in my industry to bootstrap an online one) and I'm trying to get some advice here on HN.

I have a free product launched (and then pulled because my API provider dramatically increased prices). I'm about 3/4 of the way to building a paid content-based product to ideally fund development of the free one.

So basically my most promising avenues I see are to

    1) focus 100% on the paid product
    2) eliminate the API provider as a dependency and go all out on the primary free product (risking running out of cash in a couple of months)
    3) try to raise 12k in funding so the runway extends to the end of the year.
My current choice is to focus 100% on the paid product. It's not clear how to put that into a growth goal though.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14048063

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