The Importance of Measuring Actions

Building a web applications is a fairly common practice in 2019. Customers will use your platform and they will perform actions like logging in, uploading photos and updating statuses. And for businesses, we all have metrics to measure success, revenue is a pretty good one but how often customers are engaging is good to keep an eye on too.

For the past while, we have allowed our customers on GoRoadie to update their availability status from Available to Fully Booked.

As with more early stage startups, when going for investment sometimes we are asked questions that we simply don't have the answers for. Like "How long to do people mark themselves for Fully Booker for?" Jeez. That's a great question.

This made me think about our measurements and processes entirely.

When we are building any sort of status that any customer sets - we need to know WHEN this was set.

Understanding when a customer took any particular action is curial in measurements and striving to be a data-driven business this is something we fundemenally need to do at all times.

This leads me to a principle we must follow when building any new feature moving forward: Whenever an action is taken, we understand when it was taken and by who.

Perhaps this was a bit of an oversight as we are continuously trying to move a quickly as possible, however, as we haven't started our accelerated growth journey - this is a great early catch and a great lesson for moving forward.