Monthly pirate metric update | Investing in startup teams who do customer discovery interviews

Life (and SXSW) happens, I am a little late on this update but I vow to do 12 of these this year (9 more) even if the trend goes down or the experiment fails (meaning that we miss our #s not that we fail to learn) completely. Especially then, actually. 

Here are the numbers through today!

1. ACQUSITION = 1303 clicks (up from 878 last time) as of press time to this specific point of entry https://bitly.com/milvalchal+ (from 62 countries, someboday say VAN I TY metric!) 
2. ACTIVATION - 51 people have accepted the challenge directly from the entry point above. (submitted 1 interview). This number is up from 31 from our last report. 70 people are actively on the Mailchimp distribution (meaning they have done one ore more interviews but may have a different entry into the challenge). This includes 2 spam entries (spam is bad, but people trying to GAME YOU is not always bad, see the story about PayPal. In this case it was pure spam, by my best friend no less - so the data is useless). Still off the pace of 1000 for the year, but if we hockey stick in the fall... :)
3. ACTIVATION/RETENTION 402 interviews are in the database right now up from 252 last time.  Short of our forecast of 10,000 for the year, but 400 interviews submitted is not nothing, and 100% of them are real. 
4. RETENTION still only 5 people have finished including @HeadyFoods @astokas and Josh, our new program leader in the #MILVALCHAL adapted for social good startups 

Current notes and musings since the last update

1. very few, fewer than expected are doing 100 - but many are doing 25 and 100% of people who do 25 are citing it as an extremely valuable exercise - we are going to dig deeper there
2. I am still ok with the $1,000,000 valuation for those who finish, even with those entrepreneurs in seemingly small markets that the rest of the world is ignoring, the ONLY change we are making so far is based on their INTENT not market size. If their intent is not a financial ROI, then the valuation is wrong... so Josh is stepping in to adapt this for social entrepreneurs. 
3. Our strongest pocket of challengers is in Michigan thanks to Customer Discovery Ninja.