imagine if birds were slices of pizza with wings

Chilling at Central Park.

I usually hang out here on the same bench on Sunday mornings, blast some music, and do stuff :). Going to write this newsletter and then head to the office. Lots to do with Zip this week!

We’re finding tons of cool new teachers, making dope content, planning sick new features. Everything is…coming along! I’d say things are more challenging than they’ve ever been before, though. BRING IT ONNNNN.

But, we got the world’s coolest community cheering us on. So, I’m extremely optimistic :).

—

YC always tells you to pick one core metric (your KPI) and put that metric up everywhere so you’re constantly looking at it.

It’s like the most popular thing they say.

This idea is amazing.

It also sucks and has taken me in the wrong direction many times in the past. But, not their fault. Gotta learn yourself by messing up :).

I think the core idea is super good, ofcourse. Turn your startup into a video game, pick one number as the “score”, and keep trying to beat that score every week.

How many of us remember a time where a CEO was like “Alrite everyone here’s the KPI *puts KPI on big TV screen* and we’re going to beat it this week! *looks proudly at team w/ arms crossed*”.

Haha I myself have done this in the past back when I was working on a little restaurant tech company with my friends Evan and Alec.

Again, the idea is good.

But, I think the part that’s really confusing in startup-land is how to beat your score. So it’s like, yeah you want to increase your KPI 20% in a week. Awesome. Everyone wants that. Seeing the # on a TV screen doesn’t really help. But, it’s a start haha.

What are the actual actions you need to perform to make the # move? That’s the hard part.

Do you spend time on a marketing plan? Do you focus on re-design the landing page? Do you add a new crazy new feature that you dreamed up? Do you hire a new employee to handle some new initiatives? Do you spend time improving your onboarding flow?

See. The answer…isn’t quite that clear-cut.

So yeah. All this to say that it’s awesome to have that big KPI up on TV screen somewhere. But, really make sure the inputs that actually lead to the output (the KPI moving) are clearly laid out and there is a plan to work on the inputs.

Else, you’re blindly trying to move this KPI and there are like 1,000,000 ways to do that. Up to you to pick the 2-3 ways to test that week and give it a shot.

I think we’re still getting better at this with Zip every week and aren’t perfect.

But an example is we have our main KPI (WAUs) and one way WAUs grow is if our funnel into becoming a user (landing page -> account creation -> watching classes) is improving + has a constant flow of people coming in. So, basically, if we can do things like increase the conversion from account creation -> watching classes 20%-30% that’s massive. It means wayyyyy less people are falling off between those two steps and will actually make it into the product.

So, basically, we can spend a whole week just focusing on account creation -> watching classes because if we improve that then we’d have guaranteed growth.

For example, a month ago that # was 24% (account creation -> watching classes) and today it’s 32%. That’s nearly 30% growth in the metric which is decent. Not great but it’s good. And we can keep trying to really make this # jump even more. Like, if we can get it to the 50%-75% range through tricks like targeted email campaigns, push notification, etc we can really capture a majority of the people who go from “oh, Zip looks cool” to making them power users and obsessed with us.

But yeah, it’s cool because we can focus on that specific area of the product vs try to do wider stuff that may not actually move the KPI (ex. a random feature that’s cool).

I think every early-stage company is different and it depends on the team’s vibe. Diff teams better at diff strategies. At Zip, we like working like this but it has its flaws, ofc. Every strategy does :).

And like every team is different. Some teams might feel the route to growth is: go spend time building something new for 3-6 months, make partnerships, form a launch plan, create a brand, etc. To me, that sounds terrible. But again, I guess it depends on the team/founder/market.

Anyways, back2work.