The hottest Metrics Substack posts right now

And their main takeaways
Category
Top Technology Topics

Churn Paradox

Magis • 1 HN point • 20 Feb 24
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Simpson's paradox teaches us that aggregate metrics can lead to wrong conclusions when not considering the composition of the aggregate.
  2. A common construction of churn metrics can be misleading; decreasing aggregate churn rate may not always mean the revenue base quality is improving, and sudden increases can be due to new customers rather than a decline in quality.
  3. Churn paradox occurs when fixed-period aggregate churn rates ignore the sizes of customer acquisition cohorts, leading to skewed conclusions about customer retention and revenue base.

How to write a great investor update (+templates)

Exponentially • 0 implied HN points • 28 Nov 23
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Investor updates are crucial for maintaining relationships with investors and can help with future fundraising.
  2. Investors can provide more than just money, they may offer advice, connections, and support.
  3. Effective investor updates should include key financial metrics, highlights, challenges, plans, and be consistent in frequency.
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Death by RAG Evals

ScaleDown • 0 implied HN points • 31 Jan 24
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Evaluating RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) systems is challenging due to the need for assessing accuracy, relevance, and context retrieval.
  2. Human annotation is accurate but time-consuming, error-prone, and not suitable for real-time systems.
  3. The evaluation process for RAG systems can be resource-intensive, time-consuming, and costly, impacting latency and efficiency.

How to interview people that are more competent than you

Boris Again • 0 implied HN points • 27 Sep 23
💼 Business Metrics
  1. When interviewing people more competent than you, have them explain complex concepts to test communication and understanding.
  2. Include both open-ended and technical questions in the interview process to assess problem-solving and technical skills.
  3. Ensure candidates ask questions, articulate needs, and provide appropriate solutions to evaluate their potential in the position.

Revenue is a Poor North Star Metric

TeamCraft • 0 implied HN points • 14 Aug 23
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Revenue should not be the sole metric to focus on for growth
  2. It's important for companies to align on meaningful objectives through frameworks like OKRs
  3. Choosing the right North Star Metric can lead to more efficient growth and long-term success

Key metrics for product-led marketing campaigns

thedevmarketer • 0 implied HN points • 04 Sep 23
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Key metrics differ for product-led marketing campaigns compared to lead generation or performance marketing campaigns.
  2. Important metrics for product-led marketing include CTR, likes and comments, avg. watch time, and meaningful pageviews.
  3. Engagement and consumption are crucial in evaluating the success of product-led marketing campaigns.

What SaaS metrics should a head of engineering track?

Brick by Brick • 0 implied HN points • 11 Mar 24
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Key SaaS metrics vital for an engineering leader: Focus on ARR, ACV, and TCV to gauge revenue streams effectively.
  2. Profitability metrics: Look at gross and operating margins, and free cash flow for late-stage companies to evaluate success.
  3. Efficiency tracking for startup growth: Monitor Cash Burn to Net New ARR, operational expenses per department relative to sales, to assess resource effectiveness.

Kanban Quickstart

Certo Modo • 0 implied HN points • 28 Jul 23
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Kanban is an efficient process for organizing team work, especially for interrupt-driven teams like Site Reliability Engineering, Operations, IT, or Customer Support.
  2. Implementing Kanban provides visibility, measurability, and easy reprioritization of work, helping build credibility and trust with stakeholders.
  3. Key elements of effectively managing Kanban include tracking all work items, creating clear work state columns, limiting work-in-progress, and using metrics to drive continuous improvement.

Incident Management: Alerting

Certo Modo • 0 implied HN points • 20 Apr 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Alerting in incident management notifies the team to respond to production problems promptly based on severity levels.
  2. When setting up alerting mechanisms, consider categorizing alerts into pages for emergencies, tickets for best effort during business hours, and logs that require no response.
  3. Craft actionable alerts by enriching them with context like graphs, log entries, and links to runbooks. Test new alerts thoroughly before directing them to the on-call team.

Incident Management: Monitoring

Certo Modo • 0 implied HN points • 10 Apr 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Monitoring is a crucial aspect of incident management to detect issues quickly and efficiently.
  2. Top-level metrics like Service Level Indicators (SLIs) and operational metrics provide valuable insights into system health.
  3. Data for monitoring can come from time series data, logs, and traces, and visualization tools like Grafana help in analyzing and interpreting this data effectively.

On-Call Retrospectives

Certo Modo • 0 implied HN points • 01 Feb 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. On-call retrospectives help teams stay connected to the real operational challenges they face and provide insights on how to enhance the on-call experience.
  2. Holding weekly meetings where team members share metrics, experiences, and discuss improvements can lead to a more efficient and enjoyable on-call rotation.
  3. Taking notes during the retrospective and translating them into actionable tasks for improvement can result in smoother on-call shifts and increased team productivity.

Learn to Fly.io with AnyCable

AnyCable Broadcasts • 0 implied HN points • 06 Sep 22
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. The benchmark results showed that AnyCable (RPC-less) handled 2700 concurrent connections, consuming only half of the available RAM (~120MB).
  2. Fly.io deployment guide for AnyCable and Real-time stress: AnyCable, k6, WebSockets, and Yabeda are helpful resources for developers.
  3. Issues like getting an app's Ruby version from the Gemfile have been fixed in recent 'flyctl' versions, and termination of Redis connections is intentional according to Fly docs.

The Toilet Paper Theory

Venture Prose • 0 implied HN points • 28 Aug 16
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Regularly tracking key metrics and data is crucial for seed-stage companies to observe founder discipline and consistency.
  2. Founders must pay attention to small details and regularly analyze company metrics to avoid potential organizational failures.
  3. The 'Toilet Paper Theory' emphasizes the importance of self-awareness and attention to detail, encouraging individuals to dig into small aspects to stay informed about their company.

Growth Is Not Gross

Venture Prose • 0 implied HN points • 02 Feb 16
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Continuously growing your business is crucial. If you're not growing, address the issues and keep moving forward.
  2. Focus on tracking one single, relevant metric to ensure growth. It's essential for progress and success.
  3. Measure growth accurately on a compound basis, either weekly or monthly. Understanding the impact of growth is vital for business development.

The Fantastic 4: Funnel, Model, Growth, Retention

Venture Prose • 0 implied HN points • 05 Sep 15
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Master the four sets of metrics: Funnel, Model, Growth, Retention for business success.
  2. Understand and optimize your Funnel of conversion, focusing on each step's importance in the customer journey.
  3. Focus on Compound Growth Rate for sustainable business growth and prioritize Retention metrics to ensure long-term customer satisfaction.

RDEL #6: Software Engineering Productivity: How do you measure it? (Part II)

Research-Driven Engineering Leadership • 0 implied HN points • 21 Aug 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. There is no single measure of productivity in software engineering; a combination of different metrics across satisfaction, performance, activity, communication/collaboration, and efficiency/flow are crucial.
  2. The SPACE framework, introduced by researchers at Microsoft in 2021, is a popular and effective way to measure developer productivity, focusing on dimensions like satisfaction, performance, activity, communication/collaboration, and efficiency/flow.
  3. When implementing the SPACE framework, start with a clear goal, choose metrics that cover diverse categories, include both system and perception metrics, conduct regular developer surveys, and engage the team to make productivity measurement a collective effort.

Bitcoin Mining Hashcost, Explained

Miner Weekly • 0 implied HN points • 21 Dec 23
🔮 Crypto Metrics
  1. Bitcoin's hashprice reaching new highs above $130/PH/s indicates increasing block rewards from transaction fees.
  2. A new hashcost metric evaluates mining companies' competitiveness by assessing the daily operational costs per hashrate.
  3. Reducing hashcost through improved fleet efficiency and lower energy rates is crucial for mining companies, especially with the halving approaching.

How do you know if your RAG/fine-tuned LLM implementation is good?

AI Encoder: Parsing Signal from Hype • 0 implied HN points • 20 Sep 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. To know if your RAG/fine-tuned LLM implementation is good, set up custom test cases that match your use case for evaluation.
  2. Utilize tools like DeepEval for defining custom test cases and metrics to assess your AI model's strengths and weaknesses.
  3. Before introducing an AI model to production data, rigorously test and evaluate its performance with various tests to ensure reliability.

Choosing Good SLIs

realkinetic • 0 implied HN points • 19 Feb 24
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Transitioning from on-premises to cloud environments requires a shift in monitoring practices, avoiding traditional data center-focused metrics that may not apply well to cloud-native systems.
  2. Select SLIs based on the customer experience, focusing on key metrics like traffic rate, error rate, and latency that directly impact user satisfaction.
  3. Ensure SLIs are user-centric to proactively monitor and improve customer experience, avoiding distractions with irrelevant metrics that do not align with actual user needs.

Measuring the progress and success of a strategy

Ruben Ugarte's Growth Needle™ • 0 implied HN points • 18 Jun 24
💼 Business Metrics
  1. It's important to measure the right things in a strategy, not just rely on numbers. Sometimes, we need to focus on quality rather than quantity to truly understand our success.
  2. Knowing when you’ve achieved a goal is key. You should have clear indicators so you know when to shift focus instead of endlessly trying to improve.
  3. Using the wrong metrics can lead to serious problems. Be careful to choose metrics that actually support your goals, instead of chasing numbers that don't really matter.

✅ Media Briefing #23: Words matter, PR planning, agency metrics, sludge vs nudge, TikTok tiers, sock puppet PR, and more…

Wadds Inc. newsletter • 0 implied HN points • 07 Dec 20
💼 Business Metrics
  1. Words are important in media and can change how information is understood. It's crucial to be mindful of the language used when reporting.
  2. Effective PR planning relies on good data and metrics. Agencies need to track performance to grow and improve their strategies.
  3. Social media platforms continue to evolve, with features like TikTok tiers and Spotify stories. Staying updated on these changes is key for effective communication.

ARR is dead. Long live VRR

Experiments with NLP and GPT-3 • 0 implied HN points • 27 Dec 25
💼 Business Metrics
  1. ARR can overstate the value of AI products because it counts one-off or novelty-driven payments; VRR measures sustainable revenue by applying a Utility Decay Coefficient based on workflow integration, model independence, and churn.
  2. Investors should run cohort utility audits and calculate a VRR gap using metrics like boring-day ratio, month-5 retention, integration depth, and model independence to separate ‘vibe’ revenue from durable revenue.
  3. VRR changes valuation logic by penalizing short-lived, novelty revenue to avoid inflated paper valuations and focus on products that create real habits and deep integrations.

Understanding Event-Driven Metrics

DevCube • 0 implied HN points • 05 Mar 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Event-driven systems have asynchronous actions and eventual consistency.
  2. Metrics are crucial for decision-making, monitoring, and predicting problems in the system.
  3. Metric design depends on the system component, targeting different aspects like user experience, system health, and usage statistics.

Your Boss Said "Use AI." That's It. That's the Strategy.

On Engineering • 0 implied HN points • 22 Feb 26
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Top-down 'use AI' mandates fail without tooling, standards, or metrics. Ask for clarity and record a baseline metric now so you control the narrative.
  2. The engineer role is shifting from writing everything to orchestrating and validating AI output. Automate boring drudgery with AI but keep the parts of the job that require judgment and craft.
  3. Do practical, team-led experiments: run week-long spikes, build and share a prompt library, and practice in small dojos to learn when to trust or override AI. Measure PR review time and prioritize decision quality over raw speed.

Trust the Code

Unlearning • 0 implied HN points • 08 Aug 23
🕹 Technology Metrics
  1. Low test coverage leads to low confidence in code merging
  2. Improving test coverage can increase team velocity and delivery speed
  3. Aligning technical improvements with business metrics is essential for demonstrating value