Mite Track Your Time And Manage Your Expectations

We are scanning quite a few company blogs of German startups. One odd topic has emerged within the last few months which previously just was never mentioned: impatience about the fact that users don’t line up to sign up.

Every entrepreneur wants his baby to grow and become successful as soon as possible and a feeling of disappointment when expectations are not met should always have been around, but the public lamenting about this fact is new.

There probably are two reasons for this, one being that there are a few success stories of newish German startups which demoed a steady growth during the first couple of months, the other being an only recently established ecosystem of competitive tech blogs covering all launches and a hungry crowd of a few hundred early adopters who will sign up to anything new.

Since there are only about two or three launches each day almost any site will get more initial press and users in the first couple of days than they may have hoped for. But the blogs will move on and so does the crowd, the euphoria comes with a hangover and then the real life begins.

Anyway and this goes without saying, it helps to avoid this early frustration if founders have realistic expectations. But it is not easy to access reliable information, especially for smallish sites. Alexa is close to useless for German sites except for spotting comperative trends, IVW data are only available for big sites, etc.

So it is great that mite – an almost paradigmatic example of a small but dedicated startup and probably the most 37signal’ish team from Germany, it is a very nice and beautifully executed service for agencies and freelancers to track their time – just posted their figures for their first nine months:

Number of accounts
grey = accounts created
orange = active accounts (in use within the last 2 weeks)

Number of users
grey = signed up users
orange = active users

Conversion funnel
homepage (100%) / signup page (22%) / account created (12%) / account activated (11%) / active accounts (1.7%)

Ratio created accounts / active accounts

Number of logins per day

They are also reflecting these figures, their coverage in blogs and media, word of mouth marketing, thinking about strategies to attract more users and so on. Recommended reading (sorry, German only.) Your mileage will vary of course, mite is intrinsically non viral, for instance, it is collaborative but not social, etc.

Company Blog: Blog

(This article originally was written for blognation Germany. Since blognation is gone I have reposted it here)