• “Does anybody know how many months can we skip social security before they pawn my house?”
• First hire, after 6 months in the company:
  “How’s that thing called again? Oh yeah, Bundlr.”
• Google Analytics - Right now 0 active visitors on site:
  “Let’s go home folks…”
• “OMG, yesterday we doubled our signups! Wait, is it a bug in our dashboard? Yeah, it’s a bug…”
• At a fancy restaurant:
  “I’ll have the children’s menu, please.”
• “What the hell is convertible debt?”
• “How does this code here works?”
  “Don’t touch it!”
• “When will you finish X?”
  “This week.” (For the 4th week in a row)
• “Our website is down, why is nobody complaining?”
• “We got one RT… victory dance!”
• “And the new version is live! Oh wait… rollback, rollback!”
• “Do you have some kind of startup discount?”

Those around me know how much I’m into building a startup hub in Coimbra. It’s something I recurrently thing about: what could be done to turn this city into a more attractive place to start a company? I have a long list of things to do:

• meetings to between startups (already doing it)
• workshops
• organize trips to other hubs
• bring relevant mentors to Coimbra
• make intros to recognized investors
• broadcast news about local startups
• and so on…

But the more I think about it, the more I believe the best strategy is just to work like hell to build a successful company and then invest a lot locally. Invest in all the awesome people I’m getting to know here in Coimbra.

So, back to work…

Startup Metrics 4 Pirates (Wildfire Interactive, May 2012)

I can’t tell how many times I’ve watched the Startups Metrics 4 Pirates presentation. And every time I watch it, I catch something new to apply on Bundlr.

The best part is the 5-step model, a simple way to understand the multiple dimensions of a service:

• Acquisition: users come to site from various channels
• Activation: users enjoy 1st visit: “happy” experience
• Retention: users come back, visit site multiple times
• Referral: users like product enough to refer others
• Revenue: users conduct some monetization behavior AARRR!

Now, I can’t say we’ve been following all the rules. For example, you should had focused first on Activation and Retention, until we can prove we have the solution for a relevant problem. Instead, we’ve been aiming at all the 5 steps indiscriminately, definitely not the best strategy.

But it’s very important to, at least, have a common ground to discuss where we are in terms of product and business. So, if you’re working on a startup, you should make sure everyone on the team understands this 5 steps.