When you speak of analytics, you visualize data presented as numbers, bars, graphs, pie charts and more. I wrote on why every startup needs analytics but with the diversity of available options, what kind of a dashboard you choose can decide where you’re headed.

Monitoring your startup’s progress is quite important but it’s equally important to make sure you’re tracking the right things in the right way.

Information vs. Action: Reading & Using Dashboard Data

Dashboards can be pretty enticing at first. You’re looking at real, fluctuating numbers that indicate traffic, time on site, conversions, comparisons to past performances, number of followers, social signals, results of an A/B test you ran, revenue generated so far, per-user stats etc.

But information can be useful or useless depending on what you do with it.

We’ve come a long way since counting hits to a webpage and how you read and “act” on your data can be game-changing for your startup endeavor. How?

Choosing the Right Dashboard

The internet is inundated with a wide range of analytics services. The diversity is so enormous that you can literally spend years trying to decide on the right one.

Fortunately, though, you select a dashboard that will take you towards your goals.

Choosing the right dashboard ultimately depends on:

• what goal you set for yourself/your project
• what metrics allow you to track the progress of your project (towards your set goals)
• what metrics trigger “actions” that will help you achieve your goals

It would be a waste of time to have a dashboard that shows number of users at a given instance when that data is of no significance to you.

The Two “Kinds”

I tend to think that dashboards are of two kinds.

• the ones that do most of the “thinking” for you: the action-oriented dashboard
• the ones that let you do most of the “thinking”: the information-oriented dashboard

Nothing explains things better than examples so here we go:

ThinkUp is an action-oriented dashboard. Anil Dash wrote about it (you probably saw it on HN) extolling such dashboards (naturally) and the need for such dashboards. The way it works is it communicates information about the activity around your social profiles in an “actionable” way. Labels connected to data (numbers) tell you where you are headed.

But think of Google Analytics and it’s a whole different ball-game. GA does communicate information to you as charts and numbers but it lets you decide what to track, what to fix as goals, what data to use for triggers etc.

And then think of Geckoboard. It’s a beautiful dash but it’s numbers and graph again which you can configure to a large extent. Ultimately, though, you are in charge of how you “act” on the data or how you are motivated to act upon the same.

It All Depends On You

Conclusively, all of this depends on what you actually need to do. In most cases, you’re looking for data that can help you push your project towards something: more traffic, more engagement, more conversions, more subscribers, more revenue etc.

What I do recommend is this: if you have time to analyze data, filter the fluff out and assign particular triggers/actions to the data by yourself, go for generic and larger dashboards that feed you all the numbers and charts you need.

If you don’t have the time or manpower, you choose dashboards that are “smarter” and get the work done for you. Dashboards that will tell you exactly and explicitly which landing page works better, what time of the day your email has better open rates etc. will fit your bill.

Interesting Read:

• Real-time analytics isn’t really good

Image by Flickr user: Jacob Bøtter

The CEO of Tough Mudder is obsessed with company culture and strategy. And with finding new ways to make his customers uncomfortable. (Electric shocks, anyone?)

Conventional wisdom would suggest that forcing your customers to endure electric shocks is probably a bad idea. But it seems to be working out for Will Dean, CEO of Tough Mudder, a $70 million company based in Brooklyn, New York. Tough Mudder hosts extreme events, in which participants work in teams to complete a 10- to 12-mile course. They jump into Dumpsters filled with ice, crawl under barbed wire through puddles of mud, and, yes, dash through live wires carrying up to 10,000 volts. In 2012, nearly 500,000 participants shelled out $95 to $200 to compete in 35 events in the U.S. and overseas. A native of Sheffield, England, Dean, 32, worked in British counterterrorism and then attended Harvard Business School. In 2010, he co-founded Tough Mudder with his friend Guy Livingstone. Now, Dean spends his days teaching Harvard case studies to employees and dreaming up new ways to leave his customers bruised, bloody, and begging for more. --As told to Issie Lapowsky

Running a growing business is a lot like playing pool. In the beginning, it's like you're playing without a cue ball. Then, you have a small team, and you need the cue ball. Suddenly, you have a lot of employees, and it's like you're hitting seven balls in a row. You have to hit that first ball very carefully to get that last one where it needs to go. That's my job now.

I get up early, typically around 4:30 a.m., and I try to get most of my work done by 10 a.m. I clear out emails and get my reading out of the way. I commission about two or three reports a week from my staff on things like what our price structure should be next year or what it costs to cancel an event.

By 10 a.m., I ride my bike about five minutes from my house in Brooklyn Heights to our offices. Tuesdays and Wednesdays are the days I'm usually in the office. Otherwise, I'm traveling. We have 110 employees, and it's probably been more than a year since we were all in the same place together. We have operations in Australia and the U.K. now, and we're opening an office in Germany this year. We're always setting up a venue somewhere. Like it or not, when your company gets to a certain size, the way you manage changes. You go from being a manager to a leader, and in my mind, there are only two things a leader should worry about: strategy and culture. Those two things take up most of my time.

Tough Mudder has a quirky culture. Once a month, we have something called Tough Mudder University, which everyone who's in New York attends. It's an 80-minute discussion of a Harvard Business School case study, based on a theme that's pertinent to Tough Mudder. For example, we did a case about Starbucks in the late '90s, when the core customer was a woman in her 30s. But by the turn of the century, it was becoming a wider national brand, and that created challenges. It's the same with us. Our early adopters were very fit 30-year-old guys. Now we have participants in their 80s, and we need to figure out how to serve those people, too. The case method is great from my perspective, because I get to interact with everyone, and it's a great assessment tool.

Every Tuesday, we have a staff meeting and give out awards. Our Kaizen Ninja Award, which is based on this Japanese concept about making constant improvements, goes to anyone who comes up with a great innovation. We also give out a Credo Award every week to someone who really embodies the values of the company. For example, Antonia Clark, our head of social media, won a Credo recently when she went above and beyond her job description and helped out the events team on many of the fall events. Tough Mudder is all about pushing your boundaries.

I spend a lot of time interviewing potential hires. We're growing so quickly that I probably do two or three interviews a day. I consider it a mental challenge to get someone to give an honest answer. I always ask, "Are you a hunter or a farmer?" It's amazing how many people take that question literally. If you take it literally, you've probably already failed. I also ask people what they would do if they had a month off. A central philosophy at Tough Mudder is that experience is the new luxury. Unlike an iPhone, which depreciates over time, memories and experiences actually appreciate over time. So, the applicants who tell me that with a month off they'd go to this festival and that festival tend to be pretty good cultural fits here. That's what we're really testing. Do you have intellectual curiosity, a natural sense of fun, an adventurous nature? Do you not take yourself too seriously?

I came up with the idea for Tough Mudder in business school. I noticed that people were bored with marathons and triathlons. Running's a bit boring. In what other sport do you have to listen to music to make it passable? I wanted to make something that was Ironman-meets-Burning Man, a test of all-around fitness, but in this fun, slightly quirky environment.

We aspire to become a household brand name, so mapping out a long-term strategy is crucial. I speak with Cristina DeVito, our chief strategy officer, every day, and I meet with the entire five-person strategy team once a week. We just started a new business division to try to figure out what Tough Mudder will look like in five years. I imagine we'll have several types of events related to fitness. I can see us having Tough Mudder gyms and boot camps. Eventually, Tough Mudder events will be just one business unit within an overall event planning and fitness brand.

We go on retreats every quarter to a house in the Catskill Mountains. There's no phone coverage, and the Internet connection is slow. We started the retreats to get everyone thinking about the future. We always have an event coming up, but we also need to think about how we're going to run events in 2014. If you're not answering these questions now, you're just getting less and less efficient and letting things fall further away from you. We've also come up with cool obstacles for our courses during the retreats.

Right now, we prototype the obstacles at our warehouse in Brooklyn, but we're moving into a new 48,000-square-foot office this year, which will have room for a testing facility. Alex Patterson leads our obstacle innovation team. My meetings with him are always about organization. We'll discuss how many obstacles we have at different stages of development, how people are reacting to new obstacles, and what our action plan is for changing obstacles that weren't successful.

A lot of our best obstacles started in different incarnations. Take Everest, our quarter-pipe obstacle. Our original idea was that it would be a ramp, and you'd have to take a running jump to get up. The trouble was, it was just too damn steep. People would run up and go straight back down. The next time, we built it too flat, so people just walked right up. The third time, we came up with this quarter pipe. It's perfect. You get part of the way up, and then you have to jump, and your teammates pull you up.

It's one thing to test an obstacle with 50 people in our warehouse and another to test it with 10,000 people on a course. The crowd mentality takes over. With Funky Monkey, our monkey-bars obstacle, we never considered people would climb up and walk across the top of it, but at the event, for some reason, they did. Our engineers built it so that you can dangle 500 people off it, but just like cars with good braking systems, it doesn't help if the driver's drunk. Now, we've reengineered it so you can't physically get up there.

Safety is a huge concern. We invest phenomenal amounts of money on safety. We have a medical staff at each event. We probably have more lawyers on staff than some law firms do. We have a book of contingency plans that every employee reads and takes a test on. If you don't pass, you have to go through training and have a discussion with a senior manager.

We've sold more than 500,000 tickets, and somehow, we've had no deaths. Statistically, it's amazing. You take that number of people, and if they were sitting at home that day, statistically, we should have had a few heart attacks. I have to tell the team, it's coming. We have to accept that it's going to happen at some point and work to ensure it never does.

My co-founder, Guy, and I don't spend that much time in meetings one on one, but we do have dinner together at least once a week. Guy and I have been friends since high school, and I think that's the most important thing in a partnership--having someone you know really well. You know each other's strengths and weaknesses, and Guy has many strengths that I don't. He's far more patient than I am.

Usually, by late afternoon I'm wiped out. I can probably do four or five hours of meetings a day. Then my attention span's gone. I don't let anyone invite me to last-minute meetings anymore.

I normally head home around 7 p.m. My fiancée, Katie Palms, will typically be home by then. She was at Harvard Law when I was at Harvard Business, and she's now a corporate lawyer. We met at a house party. I was pretty drunk, but she begrudgingly gave me her number anyway. I called her three or four times, and she was having none of it. Eventually, she gave in, and the rest is history. Usually, we have dinner together, and if I don't have some kind of work event, I'm in bed by 10 p.m.

I always tell people I'm probably fundamentally a bit lazy. It sounds like an odd thing to say, but it's true. I frequently gravitate toward slightly easy things, but now, the only things that come to me as CEO are really damn complicated. The great thing is, on a really frequent basis, you're reminded why you're doing this. Occasionally, I'm in a situation where people don't know what I do for a living, and Tough Mudder comes up, and they're talking about how awesome it is. There's nothing like it.

"Groupon clone" is perhaps the biggest Silicon Valley meme of the decade. News of a company merger illuminates why you should avoid getting anywhere near the clone wars.

Joking about the cancerous decay of daily-deal marketplace companies has become something of a Silicon Valley past-time, so we hardly need to point out just how insipid the online-coupon business has become. But news today may provide a slightly different teaching moment for entrepreneurs: Clones are bad. Really, really bad.

Today, AllThingsD reported that CrowdSavings, a discount marketplace start-up founded in Tampa, Florida, in 2009, will be acquired by Half Off Depot, a coupon start-up founded just a year earlier. The two companies will be rebranded as "nCrowd," and will be headquartered in Atlanta.

What's remarkable (and sort of depressing, really) is that the merger of the two companies ends the culmination of 19 previous acquisitions, a disproportionately massive share of total recent M&A activity in the United States.

But even now that newly-formed nCrowd has become the ultimate matryoshka doll of Groupon rip-offs, the entity will only represent a "fraction of the size of Groupon or LivingSocial."

That's not particularly suprising, but this is: According to the CEO of CrowdSavings, which acquired 15 daily deal companies over the past three years, most acquisitions cost him only "$100,000 to $400,000 apiece." The acquistion of CrowdSavings itself only netted the founders some $6.4 million in cash and stock. Probably not a very good ROI for a 29-person company that raised $1.3 million in debt.

The lesson here for entrepreneurs seeing dollar signs in copycatting the dailly deal market--or, really, any other already-duplicated-to-death space is obvious: Clones suck. They don't just suck because they're "stifling for innovation" and bad for consumer (which, of course, they very often are), but they suck for simpler reasons that should be more obvious--but that we don't always consider in the current buzz-heavy start-up ecosystem.

Start-up clones rarely, if ever, become fast-growing businesses, create sustainable jobs, or help push GDP forward. They are also not to be confused with late entrants into the market, as Google was with Yahoo. They are simply copycats, the result of irrational start-up froth, and they serve little use in our economy.

And, well, that sucks.

New research looks into the real effects of flattened firms and comes up with results that will surprise you.

In the world of start-ups, flatter is generally better, and middle manager is almost a dirty word. Want examples? GitHub managed to make it to 60 employees with "no managers," while gamemaker Valve has generated huge buzz with its radical employee manual describing its leaderless organizational structure.

These may be among the more extreme embodiments of the flattening impulse, but they speak to a real fervor for flat structures as up-and-coming companies try to keep their teams cohesive, responsive, and agile.

Does this enthusiasm for flattened companies hold up to careful study, though?

That's the question asked by Julie Wulf in a new Harvard Business School working paper. Through quantitative research and more qualitative interviews and CEO time-use surveys, Wulf and her team looked into the actual effects when larger companies eliminated layers of management.

She concedes that the impulse behind this delayering sounds sensible. By pushing decisions downward, flat companies aim not only to boost accountability and morale but also "to remain competitive in the face of increased competition" and "pursue a streamlined, efficient organization that can respond more quickly to customers."

The only trouble is that things don't work out as advertised. In fact, the effect of flattening an organization is, in many ways, the opposite of these stated intentions. Wulf writes:

In line with the conventional view of flattening, we find that CEOs eliminated layers in the management ranks… But, using multiple methods of analysis, we find other evidence sharply at odds with the prevailing view of flattening. In fact, flattened firms exhibited more control and decision-making at the top. Not only did CEOs centralize more functions, such that a greater number of functional managers (e.g., CFO, Chief Human Resource Officer, CIO) reported directly to them; firms also paid lower-level division managers less when functional managers joined the top team, suggesting more decisions at the top. Furthermore, CEOs report in interviews that they flattened to “get closer to the businesses” and become more involved, not less, in internal operations. Finally, our analysis of CEO time use indicates that CEOs of flattened firms allocate more time to internal interactions.

When middle management is stripped away, then, the powers it once held don't necessarily flow down to frontline team members. Instead, these decisions often get relocated to the very top of the organization. Or, in other words, flattened firms often look less like a democracy of empowered citizen-employees and more like a monarchy, with "a more hands-on CEO at the pinnacle of the hierarchy." The findings may have come from studying large companies, but small-business owners and founders are probably not immune to these unintended effects.

If you're interested in reading more about flat organizations, several other studies have also looked into the idea and found there are often negative consequences when firms go flat.

Have you ever experienced CEO control freakery masquerading as a flat organization?

All the greats know one thing: Nothing prepares future business leaders better than learning to survive and thrive under adverse conditions.

We tend to think of stress, competition, and adversity in a negative way. If you have no aspirations or happen to live in Utopia, you might get away with that. But if you want to go places in the real world, you'd better learn to embrace those concepts.

It's often said that successful executives and entrepreneurs thrive in highly competitive and high-stress environments. Indeed, they do. But they're successful because they learned to survive and thrive under adverse conditions, not the other way around. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will prepare you better to lead.

I was just reading an article that points out this interesting dichotomy. Working at technology companies like Apple, Amazon, and Intel can be highly demanding and stressful, but employees seem to thrive there.

In fact, many of those same companies are sited as great places to work. Young up-and-comers flock to them. Why? Because they know they're breeding grounds for the entrepreneurs and executives of tomorrow.

The cause and effect relationship between adversity and leadership doesn't start at work. Leaders often attribute their success to their upbringing or conditions where they grew up. New York City, for example, has spawned far more than its fair share of success stories.

Of 23 secondary schools that produced two or more Nobel laureates, nine are in the Big Apple. My high school in Brooklyn alone accounts for three Nobel Prize winners, not to mention dozens of famous executives, scientists, engineers, athletes, musicians, actors, and politicians.

Why? The ultracompetitive environment. Everybody was a character. We were always fighting for positions on sports teams, to stand out, or just to fit in. Also, we didn't grow up with much. If you wanted more out of life, you knew what you had to do. You really had to be tough. You had to be a winner.

Loads of successful executives and entrepreneurs started with nothing--except perhaps adversity. Starbucks founder and chief executive Howard Schultz grew up not far from where I did. So did Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankenfein's. His dad was a postal worker. So was mine.

Steve Jobs and Oracle founder and CEO Larry Ellison were both adopted by working class families. Former Verizon CEO Ivan Seidenberg started as a cable splicer's assistant right out of high school. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson's first job out of school was working in Southwestern Bell's Oklahoma IT department.

And this isn't just an American phenomenon, either. Masayoshi Son, the founder and CEO of Softbank and Japan's second richest man, grew up in an illegal shack in southwest Japan. His Korean parents used a Japanese surname to hide their heritage and avoid discrimination.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that, to be successful in this world, you have to have grown up dirt poor. I'm sure that plenty of top executives didn't have to fight for table scraps. But if you had spent as much time in boardrooms and start-up companies as I have, you would know how competitive and stressful it is. It's just one crazy problem after another. You're always making tough decisions under pressure and with too little information.

The truth of the matter is this. If you want to succeed in that environment, if you want to become a successful executive, entrepreneur, or business leader, then you need to embrace or at least learn to deal with stress, adversity, and competition. One thing's for sure. Avoiding it won't get you there. If you're looking for a stress-free work life, as they say in New York, fugetaboutit.

How do you know when it's time to go? Check out these five instances in which you may want to question yourself.

The simple reality is that sometimes what your venture needs to get to the next level is not what you want to do nor is it what you’re good at.

But it is extremely difficult to accept the idea that you should walk away. Nevertheless founders volunteer to give up the CEO job and many of them stick around after their successor comes in.

So how do you know when it’s time for you to quit? Here are five tip-offs.

1. Can’t get customers.

You started your company because you saw an unsolved problem and you designed a product that you thought was the solution. You got some capital from your friends and family and you’re still working on getting your product right before you put in the hands of customers.

In the meantime, you are burning through your venture’s cash. And when people ask you what you’re doing to get customers, you tell them that once you get the product right, those customers will beat a path to your door and the cash flow problem will evaporate.

If this sounds like you, it may be time to hire a CEO who understands the technology and the market and also knows how to get customers to pay for a product that they find valuable. You can still be of great value to the company by thinking about the venture’s future product direction -- but only if you are willing to let go and give the new CEO a chance to run the company.

Otherwise, your investment in the venture will be better off without you there anymore.

2. Can’t raise outside capital.

If you started your venture, built its first product, and convinced customers to use it, you have performed a valuable service. But unless those customers have the prospect of paying for your product, then your venture is likely to run out of cash.

You can see clearly that your product has great potential. But when you try to convince investors, they ask questions that you don’t want to answer:

• How big is the market that you are targeting with your product?
• Why will customers buy your product?
• What market share do you think you can take and by when?
• How will that market share translate into profits?
• How much capital do you need in order to turn those projections into real numbers?
• How long before you can pay back that investment?

If you don’t feel like it’s worth your time to seek out potential investors, meet with them, and answer these questions, then you might be able to hire a chief financial officer who does.

3. Can’t attract and motivate top talent.

Let’s say that your venture has not only been able to get customers but it’s succeeded in raising capital as well. At this point, you might be thinking that you have what it takes to bring your company to the promised land--an initial public offering or a sale to a big company like Google.

That may be true, but only if you can attract and motivate top talent. However, if you are only able to hire B players and you have to do that by luring them in with higher salaries, then you have a class A problem. And if you are able to attract top talent, but those A players leave after six months, the problem may be with your leadership skills.

You could get help fixing your venture’s culture, or it might be time to leave and let someone else attract the talent that you are driving away.

4. Can’t let go of product design.

It’s not unusual for me to talk with company founders who stick with their ventures after a new CEO has come in. And most of those founders are excited to be around their venture and happy that they have brought in a CEO with the skills that these co-founders lack in performing tasks that they do not find interesting in the least.

You might be like these venture founders. They loved working on the design of the product. And as the company grew, they were always tinkering with the designs that their engineers were developing. And in the process, the founders were throwing wrenches into the carefully constructed time lines that their product managers had developed.

These founders had no interest in supporting the efforts of their product managers. They wanted to build the new generation of products themselves, not manage other people who were doing that. One of these company founders gladly took a new role training new hires to be valuable contributors.

And with a new CEO in place, he can help the company he co-founded in ways that he finds stimulating while letting someone else take primary responsibility for boosting the value of his venture’s equity.

5. Can’t adapt to change.

If you have developed a product that has taken hundreds of customers by storm, you might conclude that you are the greatest entrepreneur who ever lived.

But if your venture is losing ground because you are a one-trick pony, do yourself and your shareholders a favor and step aside.

Stepping away from your start-up is tough, but if you fit in one of these five categories, not doing it is sure to be more painful.

Here's how you can get your website found--even if you're not an expert in SEO.

A friend recently asked me to write about the difficulties that start-up owners go through to optimize their website and get found.

Without optimization, your website will be a tiny speck of salt in a vast--and rapidly expanding--cyber universe. Chances are, your market is probably packed with competitors, and any SEO consultant is going to ask for thousands of dollars a month just for the basic package.

Aside from dedicating every waking moment to understanding how SEO works, what new tactics are trending, and what Google really dislikes this year (coming in the form of Penguin and Panda updates), it's going to be quite hard to start receiving significant sales in the first months--or year--after you go live.

Here are a few things you can do to get started:

Optimizing Your Page Titles

Adding meta titles to your pages is the first and simplest thing you will need to do to let search engines know, "Hey, I'm out here, and I'm relevant for this keyword".

Every SEO expert will tell you that prior to beginning, they will need to find what the relevant keywords for your site are. Truth be told, this is something you can also do yourself. If your industry is particular (or specific), you probably know it better than any consultant.

Do some research, and find out what the most relevant keywords for your site are. Look at your competitor's page titles, for example. Aside from this, I would focus on "long-tail" keywords, which involve phrase-like words and are more specific to a particular topic (3 or 4 words). Long tail keywords convert better, and are easier to rank for.

"Natural" Link Building

Everyone that has a website has heard about link building, which essentially entails getting other websites to link back to your site. How to do this, however, has changed dramatically in the past few years, and doing it incorrectly can actually hurt you.

Recently, Google's algorithms were created in a way to detect "unnatural" links like certain paid links, overdone anchor texts, etc. This can get complicated for a freshman SEO strategist, but the bottom line is, links should not be forced. They should happen organically, and the way to solicit them and be successful at getting good links has a lot to do with the content you create.

Great ideas for natural link building involve writing guest posts on interesting blogs, successful social media activity (and building followers), and associating yourself with other bloggers with relative interests. A high-traffic blog is only as good as its content, otherwise readers wouldn't visit it often. If your cause is interesting--and related to a topic fellow bloggers care about--chances are, they will want to talk about you.

Fascinate With Content

Aside from writing content on other blogs, you also need to write interesting content on your website. In the old days, writing content on your website could include a bunch of gibberish and bad grammar. As long as the targeted keywords were jammed in there somehow, you would have good rankings on search engines. Those days are gone. Nowadays, creating fascinating content is the one distinguishing factor that can be unique to you.

From info graphics to video blogs to inspirational stories, you have to put yourself out there. Say something bold. Write about things that people care about. Put out an inspirational image. Make your audience laugh, cry... make your readers identify with your experience. This is my strongest suggestion for any aspiring ecommerce start-up: start with a daily blog, build your followers, and then blend in your ecommerce shopping cart onto your site. If you apply the analogy of the chicken and the egg, content is definitely the egg, which comes first in my book.

Once you get these three points down, you should start seeing an increase in traffic, a deeper interest in your products, and eventually, it should transfer into sales. As soon as your sales start growing, reinvest your earnings on expanding your traffic-building strategies. From PPC campaigns, to affiliate marketing, to an SEO consulting firm, they're all options I recommend--once you have an initial following.

I still look back at the early years of doing business and think that the grassroots strategies we came up with back then--in the guest bedroom of my old condo--were far more brilliant and exciting than what we do now. It's hard, but doable! After all, what that's worth it, isn't?