If you are working in software and driving product or growth, then your life is pretty much a combination of metrics, measurement and excel sheets in between zoom calls.I have often wondered with all this data and the obsession around it, how much do we actually use to make actionable decisions?

Which ones actually matter?

After many years of intellectual pontificatory, I think  I have a simple collection of 8. These 8 according to me give  a very clear idea of the business, growth, profitability, cash flow and red flags that need immediate fixing.

While in Q2 of 2021, there were just 23 companies which got valued as Unicorns, by Q2 of 2022, that number had grown to  136 companies. A YoY increase of 491 %.

So what drove this growth?

Why did $100 million rounds triple year on year even at Series A?

Why did 1/5th of entire global funding pour into Fintech?

Fund out some macro trends , some numbers and some thoughts. 

The internet has connected all of us and while it has created tons of new opportunities and made life easier, it has also created a dystopian present where cancel culture, lack of privacy, fear of missing out, trolling and misinformation are as much part of the internet firmament, as is our ability to get grocery delivered within the hour.

Can we balance our dystopian present by controlling our technology consumption  

Can we fast our way to a technology balanced world?

The internet has connected all of us and while it has created tons of new opportunities and made life easier, it has also created a dystopian present where cancel culture, lack of privacy, fear of missing out, trolling and misinformation are as much part of the internet firmament, as is our ability to get grocery delivered within the hour.

Can we balance our dystopian present by controlling our technology consumption  Can we fast our way to a technology balanced world?

One thing that is absolutely critical about consumer apps, is that they require phenomenal scale and growth in a very small amount of time. Scale that cannot be bought by marketing, PR and paid media alone. Scale that cannot be managed by distribution alone.

This scale can only be created if consumers feel an inherent organic reason to want to use the product and keep using it many times in a day. At the same time it has to appeal to consumers of different ages groups, across different cultures, across different languages, different needs and different economic standings.

One thing that is absolutely critical about consumer apps, is that they require phenomenal scale and growth in a very small amount of time. Scale that cannot be bought by marketing, PR and paid media alone. Scale that cannot be managed by distribution alone.

This scale can only be created if consumers feel an inherent organic reason to want to use the product and keep using it many times in a day. At the same time it has to appeal to consumers of different ages groups, across different cultures, across different languages, different needs and different economic standings.

Cover version of Oasis Wonderwall

While ESPs focus on the specific email delivered to your inbox, MSPs focus on your entire mailbox behaviour to determine where they would filter and place emails within your inbox (spam/ trash/ promotions etc)

So what are these metrics?

Well according to a study conducted by Demand Metric and Return Path, there are six key email metrics that mailbox service providers track to create better filtering algorithms.

For a long time marketers and advertisers believed that the real value of location data lay in targeting a specific individual in real time, but now it’s becoming secondary to finding insights into audiences, consumer journeys and offline shopping behavior. 

The increased role of AI in ad buying makes this trend an ever more important used case. 

If Google Sheets and Zapier had a kid, it’d be Actiondesk! Actiondesk lets you create and schedule automations that:

- Import data from various sources (database and business apps),

- Run data transformations

- Trigger actions in your favorite business applications.