I just published a love letter to Urbanesia, one of the well-known startups in Indonesia through my personal blog.
The main point that I hoped got delivered was the importance of web analytics for any startups and any online business in general. Anything users do on our site can be and should be tracked. From the data that we collect, we can then know how our sites perform from their perspective! This then leads to being able to infer several things, come up with conclusions and action plans to make our sites better.
P.S. I am not saying that we should stalk our users. Rather, I’m saying that we should get to understand them for who they really are. Suppose we own a clothing chain store. Would we treat a stylish grandma and a female gothic teenagers the same? I don’t think so. And likewise online, I think we should really invest our time and effort to really understand our users.
One of the points that I also hope came through from that entry is that: Indonesian startups are not doing web analytics yet. At least not to the extent that I personally feel as sufficient for collecting enough data for their own future improvement.
This may have something to do with the current mindset embedded in people’s mind regarding online business/activation/etc
Most of us try to come up with the perfect plan prior executing. We brainstorm, came up with seemingly perfect idea and then execute it. But like all of us know, things in the online world change very rapidly. Our so-called strategy often confuses us after 3 weeks down the road: “Dude, this isn’t what I was thinking of! How the heck did we get here?”.
And I admit I’ve been guilty of committing the same crime!
I think everyone should start small. Start from the core idea; the original purpose and intention. .. And then execute it fast.
From then, give it some time, gain feedback from the data (qualitative and quantitative) and based upon that data, tweak your original startup. These are the days where feedbacks are abundant. These are the days where the distance between your users and you is only a click away. Leverage it.
I hope this notion of “ongoing improvement” is something that can start to be taken more seriously by all startups. Hopefully this development schema can also be adapted by other business models.
