More About the Startup Compass
Our mission is to increase the success rate of startups and accelerate the pace of innovation globally. Despite the enormous economic importance of high growth startups, more than 90% of all startups fail, primarily due to self-destruction rather than competition. We aim to increase the success rate by empowering entrepreneurs to make better decisions by providing them with better context and information.
Our first tool, the Startup Genome Compass is a simple benchmarking tool for entrepreneurs to evaluate their progress against other startups and make more informed product and business decisions by utilizing a data driven feedback loop.
After an entrepreneur takes the initial assessment we will automatically determine what type of startup they are, what stage they are in and diagnose them for what our research team has found is the primary cause of failure: premature scaling. Then we will benchmark the startup across more than 25 key performance indicators against startups who are in the same type and stage.
We hope to prevent entrepreneurs from scaling prematurely by supporting their decision making with data about the expected values for the core metrics related to Customer, Product, Team, Business Model and Financials. Entrepreneurs now have the information to answer questions like, "Is a 5% increase in retention good? Do I have enough users to declare product/market fit? Is now the right time to step on the gas pedal and scale?"
The benchmark is based on data from over 3200 internet startups and counting, ranging from founders with just an idea to startups that raised a Series B. Approximately 50% of the startups are from the US, 20% from Silicon Valley and the rest are from startup hubs around the world including London, Sao Paulo, Moscow, Singapore and Hong Kong.
If you have a startup we would greatly appreciate you signing up and contributing to the project. Every startup helps us get closer to cracking the code of innovation and spreading the magic of Silicon Valley with the rest of the world. All your data is anonymized, treated absolutely confidential and will not be shared.
Every few months we will summarize our findings in a report that we will share with the world to help founders around the world be more successful. In May 2011 we released our first 67 page report for free to great acclaim. It has been downloaded more than 15,000 times covered in over 150 publications and more than 15 different languages.
The team working on the Startup Genome Project is lead by a group of entrepreneurs in collaboration with academics from Berkeley and Stanford. You can find out more about the team and the report at blog.startupcompass.co.
More than 90% of internet startups fail - mostly due to self destruction. With the Startup Genome Compass we are tackling this problem. Every month you can benchmark your startup. After filling out a questionnaire we will compare you against other startups that are similar to you in order to help you set the right priorities to make you startup successful.