Plan your work and work your plan. Even Vasco Da Gama who accidentally discovered places had a north star metric. It was the North Star. He had to constantly make sure to find land as the ship ran out of supplies. Running a business can be turbulantly similar. Never run out of Money. So what’s your North Star?

Think Vasco Da Gama, think Pirate! What do pirates yell all the time? AARRR….The Pirate Metrics

(A)cquisition (A)ctivation (R)evenue (R)etention (R)eferral — Mind Blown? No pun intended

Taking a shot at each one of them (I love my puns today!)

Acquisition — How are you reaching out to your potential customer base? How do they know you exist? The various ways people reach out are, by calling and striking a conversation, Emails, SEO, Targeted Facebook Ads etc

Metric — Cost per click, Sales team spends, Paid Ads, Email open rate

Activation — Now that you have managed to get some of those eyeballs to your website/app, the next step is to provide them an epic user experience. Increase the overall engagement

Metric — Subscribers, Number of Sign-up

Retention — Making sure that they purchase multiple times from your website or use your services regularly. After all you have probably spent a ton of resources and money acquiring them. Making the most out of them is a business imperative

Metric — Daily & Monthly Active Users, Churn rate (customers leaving you is churn), time from last visited

Revenue — Money. Making sure you have enough to pay your bills

Metric — Bank account

Referral — What is your street cred? Are your existing users turning into evangelists for your service? are they saying good things about you? If they refer their friends to come your way, then you gave achieved some amount of success

Metric — NPS Score (Net promoter score), Viral Index

For Airbnb, Activation is when someone makes a booking, Retention is when they do it every 6 months, Referral is when they spread the love and get more signups.

Its better to have some sort of overall framework when it comes to running a business. I personally hate the term “Spray and Pray”

At Soukapps, we work with various sizes of businesses and the owners are pretty good at their core business of manufacturing their core product. What they really need is a technology partner who would get on top of the tall buildings and sing about their brands OUT LOUD. Here we are data driven and always have designed an AARRR framework unique for each business.

Be a pirate! AARRR!!!

Best!