The tricky part is getting people to understand what really drives their business and at the right level. It's not even just picking the right metrics, it's understanding them enough to take action on them.

My metric for metrics is to track things that will change your behavior. If a metric changes and you don't, then it's a pointless metric.

I've seen many companies track reasonable metrics, only to do nothing about them when they change. They just try to "do more" of whatever they were already doing.

Doing the right things with the right metrics is not a skill that everybody has and not everybody can learn.

This is true. Also beyond these problems, I am going to say something else.

Marketing is not the result of a few actions. It is and should be something woven into all business activities. It should be part of your email signatures, participating on social networking sites, etc. All of the little things build up and the thins which really help with building a presence.

There are legitimate marketing hacks but they don't involve tricking users. They involve living and breathing marketing, and realizing that building your business means a billion little marketing hacks, not a few big ones.

Best thing I've read on HN in a while.

"My metric for metrics is to track things that will change your behavior. If a metric changes and you don't, then it's a pointless metric."

This is exactly what you are supposed to do in high-level RTS strategy. In Starcraft for example, you should know ahead of time what 'tells' you are looking for, and disregard the rest. It lets you focus only on the information that influences your decisions, and minimizes distractions from "scary" things the opponent may be doing.

>> My metric for metrics is to track things that will change your behavior. If a metric changes and you don't, then it's a pointless metric.

That's an interesting approach, and seems like a really useful filter for quick sanity checks of the correlation or causation question.

This is why the the Silicon Valley high-growth game is so strange.

In a normal company, the metrics would center around, "Are we making money?" "What sort of things point to us making more money?"

In the SV game, it's "Are we attracting attention?" "What sort of things will cause us to get more attention?"

> In the SV game, it's "Are we attracting attention?" "What sort of things will cause us to get more attention?"

It's not particularly strange if you break down the business models that dominate the SV ecosystem. These companies you speak of are merely procurement channels. Think of them as oil drills that suck up as many attention spans as physically possible. And largely they are all competing with each other to strike the next big oil well. Not unlike the oil industry they put massive amounts of capital into the discovery and refinement of such oil wells. The likes of Facebook, Google, etc are simply refineries who sell this attention (refined by analytics and insight) off to the Fords, Coca-Colas, etc of the world.

That's a solid analogy. Thank you.

The fascinating thing is that this is the norm in business, not the exception.

You may think, how can that be? Wouldn't that cause companies to go out of business all the time?

Guess what, companies go out of business all the time. Most companies are fairly short lived, and a lot of the reason why is because they live in a fantasy land instead of concentrating on the fundamentals. Another fascinating thing you'll find is folks who have the knack of turning businesses around. There are plenty of reality TV shows about this sort of thing too. However, in almost every case turning around a business is mostly a process of concentrating on fundamentals and making pragmatic choices.

>There are plenty of reality TV shows about this sort of thing too.

Despite my general aversion to the genre a reality show about someone fixing other people's businesses sounds interesting to me. If it isn't staged you can probably gain something from watching it and looking for common trends.

It works well when we're in a bubble, as we are now. Instagram and tumblr sold for billions, neither company was even remotely profitable.

Because "traction" is the tail that wags the "startup" dog :)

Keep in mind that many of the startups in Silicon Valley are in the business of selling stock.

So trying to "hack" metrics that appeal to investors is an entirely rational endeavor.

Oddly enough, money can also be a false proxy. Value is a better term, but still not enough to capture the complexity.

YCers, and you say?...

I hate when apps ask to post to Facebook or Twitter on my behalf. It's uncomfortable and puts the user in an awkward position. Great article, hope some of these companies take note!

This article is right.

But, what's the point of articles like this?

Few people are so stupid that they believe moving some number is the same as doing well. There are lots of times when moving some arbitrary number is rewarded, and we know that humans respond to incentives. It's perfectly logical, and even the best strategy in some situations.

People who pull tactical games like this might be able to get by, or do well, or become captains of dying industries, but fundamentally we can probably agree they are assholes. Plenty go along because they are playing the junior edition same game with the junior edition of the same strategy. When there isn't a risk of repercussions, or when they feel like they have a chance to gain credibility, or whatever motivations big smart apes really act out of, they loudly laugh at and mock the asshole; because of the hurt they feel at wasting the part of their life that was spent doing something so obviously worthless, and because of the shame and regret of compromising themselves, and because it's a good move.

Some people have real problems. Some people don't get enough food to eat. Someone could say that it's a form of privilege to have problems like "I don't believe in my job". It almost certainly is.

Somewhere in some country where people die of things that people just don't die of other places, there are people officially working on things, and money being spent, all kinds of activity done because someone feels like that is their best strategy, and the people involved know it's stupid and pointless and a waste, and they know there are people suffering that could suffer less.

It's easy to play along. It's easy to play a strategy that maximizes personal outcomes. In fact, the people at the top almost certainly got there by playing such a strategy. It seems likely that it's an evolutionarily stable strategy, despite the implication that a lot more suffering is going to happen.

I wrote the piece, it seems to have been very well received.

I've read your 5 paragraphs and I can't really understand what you're saying.

I'm saying that your advice is pointless, because nobody who could benefit from your advice chases a metric because they don't realize the things you say in the article. The things you say are obvious, and anyone who doesn't find them obvious is so profoundly stupid that there are thousands of basic skills they lack besides the one your advice corrects.

They chase metrics because they are in a situation where moving those numbers does something. In the case of the startup you mention, they could use the user count graph to raise money, which is probably what they were trying to do.

I go on to say that doing things like moving a metric for its own sake is really an example of deceptive signaling, which is pervasive in human affairs. On the way I point out the fact that deceptive signaling is often performed by a team of people, and many of the team members or employees actively work on such things despite having to grapple with moral reservations, and I talk about that for a bit, and point out they are not really innocent, but are acting primarily out of self interest.

Next, I talk about how many or most of the major problems in the world are due to resources being wasted because someone calculates that they can benefit more by using those resources to engage in deceptive signaling than by helping people, and they have many accomplices that recognize what is happening but assist anyway.

Finally, I point out that this is likely a dominant strategy, so there is almost no way to become powerful or remain in power except by engaging in such activities (using available resources in the way that maximizes power rather than any other consideration, such as preventing starvation), and I close by expressing my regret that this is so.

This article is dead on the money. I think this comes back to people having a hard time discovering the value that their product offers customers.

They may hear that 2+ invites, and 3 projects 'activates' the customer - but they don't truly understand what that means and why that provides value.

I have noticed that with some of my clients too, and other entrepreneurs I talk to.

That's one of the reasons I am starting to write more about discovering/understanding value.

The first such post is 'Redefining MVP to Minimum Valuable Product'[1] because I think that's a perfect place to start - plus it is where I have been noticing this issue pop-up more and more in my work.

I think the entire industry does need to take a step back and really start re-evaluating the way we analyze/discover value. It feels like it has been lost with everybody trying to go too fast and 'hack' everything.

[1] - http://5kmvp.com/blog/2013/09/17/redefining-mvp-minimum-valu...

I'm glad that I know a good term for "false proxies" now. It seems to be a problem that comes up all the time in wildly different contexts. I sometimes call it "painting a banana yellow", but that doesn't necessarily convey the meaning to someone unless I've previously explained the analogy.

[Google+ growth-hacked their way to 170 million users,...]

It is just like a math expression: Google+ growth-hacked.

If "Yahoo!" can be inserted in this sentence, it would be funnier.

I don't think I've ever heard Growth Hacking used in the sense you described. I'm sure someone has, but I nearly always see it in the sense of "tricks to increase user acquisition or conversion."

My understanding has always been it's one who "hacks" the "growth" of the company. Which coincidentally is why I've always had a somewhat negative impression of the term.

Intriguing title.

"Had Google+ focused on a metric of “Users who choose to go to Google+ and share at least 2 updates per week“, they would have focused their efforts on delivering value to users rather than popups that drive numbers."

The Google+ foundation is all there -- they already focused on that: it really is the foundation of a brilliant social network, and I prefer it purely given that they don't decimate photos by the horrid overcompression that Facebook does. Their problem now is purely a network problem in that people don't see the point of sharing updates there given that many of the people they share them with aren't there. I fail to see how this example supports what they are saying whatsoever.

OT My recollection of the G+ scenario is that they stunted it themselves - for whatever reason. By the time the people I knew actually had access I'd lost interest in waiting for my friends to show up. They arrived to find that after a month nothing was going on and they lost interest. I'm not sure how it's doing these days but it felt like a massive missed opportunity.

Completely agree with this. Me and some other friends were legitimately excited for Google+ when it was released as beta but couldn't get an invite. By the time it went public nobody cared enough to fill out a profile.

Dont worry, if you use gmail, youtube, or android you already have a profile ready for you.

This idea of shoving everyone into G+ as your default google sign-on and identity is pretty controversial. Most everyone I talk to about it finds it annoying. So they went from being exclusionary to being almost mandatory. Not sure what the long term plan is here. Google probably doesn't know either. They rushed a facebook clone for their own reasons and now here it is, a virtual ghost town.

also see "nymwars", pretty much my ENTIRE pseudonym-loving social circle hopped onto G+ with great enthusiasm, only to be chased off and/or fragmented by Google's REAL NAMES ONLY policy.

Google+ deserves to wither and die because of the BS they have pulled.

When I'm forced to create a Google+ account just to use some of the basic features of the corporate Google Apps account which my company already paid for, it becomes quite clear there is no one at Google who gives a damn about customers. They are just trying to inflate their numbers at all possible costs.

It will be a great day when companies are finally forced to stop playing the "number of signups" game and start playing the "number of people who actually like our service and use it willingly" game instead (and no, we're not there yet; not even close).