The Power of the WBR

One of my hobbies is advising my friend's startups - one of which is a company called Carista. Carista builds a mobile app and hardware that allows you to customize your car. 

In Feb, they realized the need to ramp up sales and marketing. We began to institute a process called WBR - Weekly Business Review. This is famed process use within Amazon where executive decision making is done using data by the CEO (or any executive). Here is a template that I've personally used at Apigee and what is being used at Carista.

You can download a template here

How to Run a WBR (in less than 30 min)

1. Let the CEO / advisors review the metrics (5 min)
2. WBR Owner provides oral interpretation of data (5 min)
3. WBR Owner provides a suggests several "experiments" to CEO base on data.  (10 minutes)
4. CEO approves, WBR Owner executes (1 minute)

How this worked at Carista (Real world example)

In Febuary, Carista knew that it had to invest in advertising to increase both hardware and inapp purchases. The marketing manager had then setup a combo of Google Search Ads, Amazon Sponsored products, and Google AdMob (Mobile) ads. 

The WBR revealed that a modest amount of ad spend increased the Amazon Hardware sales by close to 50%, and even the in-app purchases increased by 15%. The Google AdMob adds had not worked, and the downloads flat. Thus we concluded that not only that advertising was working for selling hardware, but also that people who bought the hardware had a very high probability to upgrading to the paid version of the software. We verified the March results looking at the "Weekly metrics" to validate that March was not a fluke. As a result, the CEO decided to increase ad spend by 3x for the next two weeks to see how fast it can scale it business. This took exactly 25 minutes to analyze and come to a final conclusion. Imagine if you can make these kinds of bold bets with data !

Tips for WBR

• WBR requires WEEKLY participation and analysis
• If you are in charge of the metrics, show metrics that helps OTHERS make decisions and draw conclusions, not you.
• Use my WBR template
• Have some hypothesis about the weekly metrics, especially for dips and peaks.
• KPIs and data should be small enough to fit in a single Excel/GSheet on a mobile phone at a normal font
• Weekly and Monthly metrics should inform each other - 
• Weekly and Monthly metrics should have different KPIs. For example, conversion metrics on a weekly basis is too noisy, where as conversion on a monthly basis is more accurate

WBRs are designed for executives and CEOs that need to scale their organization and make their decision making as fast and efficient as possible. Let me know your thoughts on what works and what doesn't.