Most of my management experience comes form e-commerce related companies. Yet at Earlybird Venture Capital, we hardly ever invest in e-commerce models. An issue? Not really. Having worked in a mainly data driven environment, I strongly believe that most of my experience of running companies with a focus on the principles of to measure, to track and to adapt can be applied to any company. Actually, it should be applied. The more you measure and track the more you understand relations between actions and reactions within your company and from outside.

Being able to measure KPIs is what makes todays businesses so great. Especially in an online world, measuring and tracking has become so easy. With free tracking tools anyone can start building his own KPI dashboard. I want to give a starting point from where you can build your own tools. Change it, adapt it, use it. Call it your own. Yet if you like it, I would love to read about it in the comments.

In the coming months I want to introduce a number of data based management tools that should help you run your early state e-commerce company. Again, why commerce? I think many things can be adopted from the e-commerce world easily. If I introduce a tool that measures reoccurring SaaS revenue and COGs for a software product, it might be more difficult to adapt this to your e-commerce business, than the other way round. E-commerce businesses only work if you understand your KPIs. Or unit economics as we like to call it. The competition is fierce and if you don’t understand your own success or failure, you can adapt quickly and improve quickly. In the end, you need to become a Business Intelligence master, at least on the interpretation side of if, to guarantee the success of your startup.

My first tool will be a marketing KPI tracker on google docs, looking forward to your comments.