Ben Billy's Story
From "the Kid with the Stopwatch" to Co-Founder of StoryTiling
Ben Billy as a young child
StoryTiling Co-Founder and COO, Ben Billy, is a natural ‘company builder’. He is a data-driven leader who seeks real life insights and uses them to set goals...and then smash them.
“Nothing makes me happier,” he explains, “than outperforming an ambitious goal.”
Turns out, Ben has been like this since he was a young child!
“What I was a kid, I played alone a lot. All my games were around establishing and then beating any record I could think of. Competition against myself. That was my thing”
Ben wouldn’t just play with a puzzle. He would measure how long it would take him to make it. Record the time. And then try to beat himself. And he was diligent with his record keeping - with separate records set and kept for 500 piece, 1000 piece, 2000 piece puzzles etc.
“I would run a lap around my grandfather’s house and time that. Write it on a piece of paper. Then try to beat my time. I had records documented for one lap, two laps, three laps and five laps. I measured everything.”
Ben’s favourite toy was his stopwatch, which makes sense...it enabled his precise record keeping.
“There were so many things I could compete against myself - so many things I could measure!”
Even the stop watch itself offered the opportunity to define and set a ‘record’: “I would start and stop the stopwatch as quickly as I could to see how quickly I could push the button. My record was 0.06 seconds. I still remember.”
As Ben grew older, technology improved, and Ben’s record keeping grew more sophisticated. In his teenage years, he started keeping excel spreadsheets to track his tennis stats, “I had one spreadsheet per season and tracked all my metrics. Then I’d analyse my performance, tracking ratios of games and sets won/lost etc”
Today, Ben has an app that helps him track his daily habits. He measures 30 habits he consciously wants to embed in his routine - from donating blood monthly, to how often he does yoga, to how many pages he reads, to how often he drinks alcohol. His goal is to create as long a streak as possible for each habit.
Setting KPIs - translating everything into a quantitative measure and then smashing it - is in Ben’s DNA. And it’s central to how he runs StoryTiling.
“One of my core KPIs at the moment is the number of stories told in the StoryTiling app,”
Ben explains, “But that requires a number of sub-metrics as well. We’re tracking number of accounts created, number of downloads...and then identifying where people drop off. It’s a key part of building a product people love”
It’s clear that Ben loves building the product - and the millions of ways he can define measurable KPIs for the team to beat (over and over again).
It almost feels as though Ben’s childhood was training for building a company today.
If you want to help Ben achieve his current KPI of the # of stories told in the StoryTiling app, download the app on iOS or Android today.