There has been considerable buzz in Atlantic Canada each time lean startup guru Ash Maurya, author of the groundbreaking book Running Lean, has visited the region. But there should be even more excitement that the co-author of a worthy companion piece lives in Halifax.

Benjamin Yoskovitz’s official title is vice-president product at GoInstant, the co-browsing startup that was bought by Salesforce.com last summer. But in the last year, he has also teamed up with Alistair Croll to write Lean Analytics: Use Data to Build a Better Startup Faster.

Maurya changed the way start-ups develop business ideas, advising they use a nine-panel “canvas” to plot their development, research their hypotheses and amend the canvas as they learn more about their product and market.

Croll and Yoskovitz build on that methodology, teaching tech entrepreneurs how to measure, quantify and analyze specific metrics to determine if entrepreneurs are on the right track.

 “The Lean startup movement shows you a way to run a business that brought fundamental changes,” Yoskovitz said in an interview in a downtown coffee shop last week.

 “Lean Analytics lets you get among the weeds and understand what you’re seeing.”

The book came out in March and the authors have been touring with it, including stops together or individually in Amsterdam, Japan, San Francisco and the U.K. Yoskovitz, who moved to Halifax from Montreal last year, also spoke at the recent Atlantic Venture Forum in Halifax.

While most business books leave the reader bemoaning the senseless slaughter of the trees it took to produce the volume, Lean Analytics reveals a refreshing depth and breadth of insight produced through research and experience. It’s an exceedingly well organized tome, presented in cogent English.

The kernel of Croll and Yoskovitz’s thesis is that entrepreneurs are natural liars who delude themselves — and their investors — about the value of their business proposal. The only way to prevent such delusions from sinking their business, to ensure they’re on the right track, is to measure specific business metrics.

What metrics?

That depends on what technology segment and stage of business development the company is in.

The authors examine five stages of startup growth:

•Empathy, in which the entrepreneurs understand the pain in the market and how to solve it.

•Stickiness, in which clients use the product regularly.

•Virality, in which word spreads about the product.

•Revenue, in which the product generates money for the company.

•And Scale, in which there is an explosion of paying customers.

The authors stress that entrepreneurs should not rush on to the next stage until the metrics show they have mastered the one they’re on. To judge whether they’ve mastered that stage, entrepreneurs need to focus on what the authors call OMTM — One Metric That Matters.

Entrepreneurs must cut through the noise and find the one ratio that shows they are succeeding in a particular stage of their business. Maybe it’s revenue per user or the time each user spends on the site.

But the important thing is to identify the important ratios, establish what an acceptable level is and focus on it until you reach that level.

“The truth is that startups are inherently chaotic and you have to run in a lot of different directions,” said Yoskovitz. “There’s always a lot going on. But if you let that consume you, then it will drown you.”

He added that he considers Lean Analytics to be a reference book, a volume that entrepreneurs can consult repeatedly as they build their business.

Lean Analytics breaks down the IT sector into six segments, and delves into what metrics are appropriate for companies in each segment at each stage of development.

So someone developing a mobile app at the Stickiness stage will monitor different metrics than someone in e-commerce at the same stage. But that mobile app developer will also use different metrics as he progresses into the later stages.

Yoskovitz and his co-author are meticulous in outlining what the metrics are in each stage of each segment. It’s what makes this book so valuable to entrepreneurs.