You know that in Lean Startup, you should be avoiding Vanity Metrics. These tell you less useful facts about your business and can be a misleading sign of progress.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Instead, look at real metrics with cohort analysis. But what is cohort analysis, and how do you do it?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Instead of looking at cumulative vanity metrics over time, the more accurate analysis is to separate<\/strong><\/em> users into groups based on the time they joined<\/strong>, then measure your metric for each group independently. Each group of users is called a cohort.<\/p>\n\n\n\n For example, say we wanted to measure engagement in an app by number of photos sent. Each week, we take all the users who joined that week, and then look at the average number of photos each users send in their first day. We work really hard for 4 weeks, and we hope to see this number rise. Instead we see this:<\/p>\n\n\n\n