One of the thing i am obsess about when i start something new is to find the pulse of what should be measured on a daily basis to gauge the progress.
In a complex world, i believe in simple things to help you make decisions.
When i started music seriously i was measuring the number of new music standards i was able to memorize and play. I was simply counting them. The more i knew, the better i was getting at playing jazz combinations and harmonies
When i started blogging seriously i was measuring the number of comments for each blog post. That was to me the most important parameter, more than page views.
It takes time to know what you should consider your pulse, because there are so many things you can measure
For a startup usually this is the number of users or paid customer. But how can you measure users when you don't have any at first. Or paid customers when you don t have any at first? A pulse should be meaningful to you but also to the activity you re in and the maturity of your activity.
At appsfire we started first by counting the number of clicks we were sending to the app store and android market on a daily basis. Then the amount of affiliate comissions we were getting (because it was indicating how impactful we were on the download generation).
Today we have a internal "on yammer" special signal everytime we sign a new promotion deal with an app developer.
We still count downloads and users. But the most important metric to us (and the most exciting one) is that one
Actually you should consider a pulse something that is relevant and exciting. It has to happen enough so you can have a frequent signal to be happy about
Finding it is not instant. but when you find it, it will resonate.
