I often suffer from statistics paralysis. Too many metrics, too many moving parts, too much stuff to optimize.
Over the years, I’ve learned that it’s helpful to pick just one or two key metrics to focus on. When I joined Exsila, my initial key metric was number of trades. But somehow it just didn’t feel right.
Then we found our real key metric: Number of newly offered items. The more items we have, the more attractive we are for buyers. More selection + better prices = more users + more trades.
Inspired by Amazon Prime Day we did something similar. On Exsila’s birthday we ran a 24-hour promotion and incentivized adding new items. The results blew us away: 40.000 new items were added and 8.000 were sold in just one day (instead of 1.000 each on average). Our total inventory was increased by 16 percent in just 24 hours. Wow!
In hindsight it seems like a no-brainer, but the truth is that we almost skipped this promotion. It didn’t feel like a big enough story. But then we said “It’s worth a shot” and did it anyways.
This method turned out to be a jackpot to boost our key metric. Now Exsila uses this tool regularly to push certain categories, to push the usage of the mobile app and much more.
What is your key metric? And how can you boost it?
