Compass lets startups check their growth against similar companies using more than 30 data sources

While startup CEOs measure key metrics to keep tabs on how well their business is doing, it can be hard for them to know exactly what counts as a good figure or a bad figure. How are they faring against their peers? Compass is a new tool that aims to answer that question.

Compass comes from the team behind the Startup Genome project, that collected data from around the world about what makes startups succeed or fail. It can be set up to pull in data automatically from the likes of Google Analytics, Salesforce, Mailchimp, Quickbooks, Mixpanel, PayPal and Stripe, and it also accepts directly input data too. This information is used to generate a dashboard that shows startup CEOs how they’re faring against similar companies with regard to revenue growth, customer growth and customer lifetime value.

The idea is that CEOs have a simple reference point from which to identify problems, validate strategies, prioritize and set objectives. The company says that more than 30,000 tech companies are already sharing their data to generate the benchmarks, although it keeps names of the specific companies participating anonymous and private.

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Compass builds upon the benchmarking that was previously available to contributors to Startup Genome. “The initial theory and research (has) evolved into a dynamic model that is capable of understanding a business in its full uniqueness with all of its implications,” says Compass’ Cheyenne Richards.

“The company evolved as well, adding new team members with expertise in technical infrastructure and machine-learning algorithms, while original team members helped define technical requirements and are now primarily functioning as advisors.”

Richards says that plans for the future include more industry specific benchmarks (such as the average shopping card size for e-commerce or daily and monthly active users for games); filtering on aspects such as customer acquisition cost for different channels and locations, and the addition of “another hundred or so” data sources.

Compass is free to use and there are plans for a premium version in the future.

➤ Compass

Image credit: Dm_Cherry / Shutterstock