Massive Growth or Profitable - Those Are the Options
January 22, 2026
The new World of AI has changed investor expectations for startups and that is making survival more and more binary.
Today, we’re talking about what metrics to use at your startup.
First of all, your core metric of success should be either revenue, how much money you’re making, or engagement, how many people rely on your service.
Next I like to look at your business as a simple funnel, where you measure: distribution, user engagement and churn.
When selecting the actual metrics to use for each of these categories, make sure they hold you accountable and measure real progress. For example, don’t use a metric like website hits or app downloads to measure your distribution, instead measure qualified leads. Don’t measure Monthly or weekly active users, look at daily users. And don’t use $ churn to measure people leaving your service, look at actual user churn.
