My co-founder will forgive me (in time) for relaying some quality content that he gushed today on our morning call:
"There is a variance in which companies at an early stage will care about instrumenting their successes. It is certainly possible to bypass instrumentation altogether and just chase targeted traffic, but your churn problem can eat you alive, and even if you somehow power your way through the churn problem with massive piles of cash or because you rode a trend-wave to success, you'll plateau and start to suck. I've seen the inside of these two approaches, and though both of my example companies ended up being successful, I know that the company that cared more about the instrumentation had a well-oiled machine when they finally reached scale.
The company that didn't focus on instrumenting their analytics now has a nightmare scenario on their hands in trying to understand what people want as they try to move into more profitable markets. They have mountains of data, but its painful to extract and report on it."
