I’ve been working with a good friend and colleague, Paul Singh, Founder of Dashboard.io to beta test his new analytics tracking solution for startups/founders/investors which is based on the metrics standard AARRR from Dave McClure, Founder of 500startups and the guy behind Startup Metrics for Pirates. Dashboard.io allows startups to see how they rank against other startups while investors benefit from it the same way.

I threw together this blog post and WordPress plugin based on Dashboard.io tracking integration and AARRR standard to save time on applying the code on wordpress sites and to eventually make the plugin seemlessly integrate for all stages of the conversion funnel proposed by AARRR.

So far Dashboard.io is working well for me on my sites like Music.com and is helping people understand relevant metrics and conversion goals for their websites.

If you’d like to fork this plugin or download it for now I just have it on github. I’ll publish to WordPress.org CODEX if there’s demand for it.

I welcome feedback and kudos to Paul Singh for releasing this analytics app.

A recent article of an interview by Guy Kawasaki on the authors of a book called “egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability)” is a great read for anyone moving up the ranks of their career and other avenues of potential success in life.

Personally I find that a certain amount of ego is complementary to your professional reputation. One of the first answers in the interview suggests that if your ego has been boosted by success in the past, if one is not careful, that success creates the illusion that it was them alone that achieved that success. And the more publicly visible they are, the more they believe the headlines that attribute their success to just them.

I firmly believe that if you work hard on something and achieved success, your reputation will be increased naturally because word will get around eventually. So keeping modest and being humble of one’s success is not a bad thing at all. The author suggests that a potential combination of ambition, ideas, and healthy ego drives one’s success. So as with many things in life, finding the right balance is something one may just have to learn by making mistakes.

Several obvious tell tale signs of breaking the barrier to becoming an egomaniac that I found interesting in the article:

• Seeing someone you work with as a rival and think about how to beat them.
• Taking disagreement with your ideas personally.
• Compulsively following a competitors lead so they’re not doing anything you’re not.
• Criticizing competitor’s strategies and prematurely discard them as irrelevant.
• Disagreeing with someone’s point just because they’re the one who said it.
• Feeling worse about where you are when you see what others achieve.
• Seeking acceptance: desiring respect and recognition interferes with success.

So now you’re probably wondering what might be considered a “healthy ego”? The following interview excerpt might enlighten you:

Genuine confidence; confidence that doesn’t have to exert itself to prove it’s confidence. Healthy ego keeps us from thinking too highly or too little of ourselves and reminds us how far we have come while at the same time helping us see how far short we are of what we can be. But to understand what healthy ego is, you have to understand the relationship between ego and humility. For most people, tradition holds that the opposite of excessive ego is humility, when in fact having too little ego is just as dangerous and unproductive as having too much.

There are also those people who say that extremely confident and ambitious people can also show signs of being an egomaniac. I can’t argue with this idea either, but if you can balance the image of the ego with your humility and remembering how you achieved success in your life (if you started with humble beginnings), then you might just live a more harmonious life.

Having started 2 startups in the last 3 years, I’ve come to benefit greatly from understanding and reading material from the venture capital realm. Even with the most brilliant of ideas to launch a new venture, no amount of planning or selling will overcome the habits that some entrepreneurs inadvertantly do in their projects. The habits in question pertain to keeping morale up in the arduous times of stress and tension that come with bootstrapping and even with seed-funded startups. The key is not to stress and ensure you can take small steps and small wins instead of looking too far ahead. For nearly everything in life it’s a good idea to consider the value of all your actions, decisions and habits and reconsider them to improve your yourself to both survive and prosper.

Enterpreneurs are faced with potentially monumental hurdles in their way such as overcoming threats from competitors and keeping the ‘bloat afloat’ when it comes to capital and operational stability. Many times startups have ended up failing within a few years due to any number of reasons. These are big risks we take as entrepreneurs, and we can’t just ignore the climate in the office or people’s morale.

An recent article on CNN Money talks about particular habit that I just recently overcame due to a suggestion from my good friend @paullyvenne. Paully hinted to me that I had an unknowing habit of saying ‘no’ in many of my responses to people’s statements, even if I was agreeing with them! I did not believe him at first, but then I noticed it.

From that point on I recognized it and did my best to avoid this habit. I suggest you read this article in case you’re worried that you have these habits. They really apply to anyone, not just for leaders or entrepreneurs.