At a small startup, there’s usually only one person focused on growth full-time. The problem is that you can’t expect one person to be able to do everything at once. So how do you know where to start?

A few weeks ago I introduced the lean marketing funnel as a framework for analyzing your customer lifecycle. This is the tool that I use most often when trying to identify where I should focus my time.

As a quick refresher, you want to break out your user flow into the five stages of the lean marketing funnel:

Acquisition – how people get to your homepage
Activation – how you convince someone to use your product and give you their contact info
Retention – how you get someone to come back
Referral – how you get people to tell their friends
Revenue – how you make money

The first thing you should do is make sure you have a good sense of what the conversion rates are at each point in this process. You can do this by setting up a good event-tracking system like Mixpanel or KISSmetrics. I don’t recommend Google Analytics because it takes some time to set up and because of the interface it’s too easy to get distracted by vanity metrics. Read More »