Alistair Croll

In the same way, a business model is a combination of things. It’s what you sell, how you deliver it, how you acquire customers, and how you make money from them.

You can build business models this way, but instead of heads, torsos, and feet, you have several aspects of a business: the acquisition channel, selling tactic, revenue source, product type, and delivery model.

The acquisition channel is how people find out about you.
The selling tactic is how you convince visitors to become users or users to become customers. Generally, you either ask for money or you provide some kind of scarcity or exclusivity—such as a time limit, a capacity limit, the removal of ads, additional functionality, or the desire to keep things to themselves—to convince them to act.
The revenue source is simply how you make money. Money can come from your customers directly (through a payment) or indirectly (through advertising, referrals, analysis of their behavior, content creation, and so on). It can include transactions, subscriptions, consumption-based billing charges, ad revenue, resale of data, donations, and much more.
The product type is what value your business offers in return for the revenue.
The delivery model is how you get your product to the customer.

Backupify was good at focusing on a specific metric at a specific stage, in order to grow the company. “Initially, we focused on site visitors, because we just wanted to get people to our site,” said CEO and co-founder Robert May. “Then we focused on trials, because we needed people testing out our product.”
Once Backupify had people trialing the product in sufficient numbers, Robert focused on signups (conversions from free trial to paying customer). Now, the primary focus is monthly recurring revenue (MRR).

metric changes the way you behave precisely because it’s aligned to your goals of keeping users, encouraging word of mouth, acquiring customers efficiently, or generating revenue.

The company didn’t have an in-depth analytical dashboard at the time, but Mike could still do some exploratory analysis.

A leading metric (sometimes called a leading indicator) tries to predict the future. For example, the current number of prospects in your sales funnel gives you a sense of how many new customers you’ll acquire in the future.

a lagging metric, such as churn (which is the number of customers who leave in a given time period) gives you an indication that there’s a problem—but by the time you’re able to collect the data and identify the problem, it’s too late. The customers who churned out aren’t coming back. That doesn’t mean you can’t act on a lagging metric (i.e., work to improve churn and then measure it again), but it’s akin to closing the barn door after the horses have left. New horses won’t leave, but you’ve already lost a few.

: in order for the MVP to be considered successful, parents and kids would have to each use the application four times per week.

ather than running a series of separate tests one after the other—which will delay your learning cycle—you can analyze them all at once using a technique called multivariate analysis