What They Don’t Tell You About Startup Metrics (Until It’s Too Late)
What *NOT* To Do
I was focused on the wrong metrics for a decade.
Like most startups, we religiously tracked subscription revenue, renewal rates, # of customers, average deal size, plus alllll the product usage.
Does this sound familiar?
How well are they using the product??
How many users?
How often are they logging in?
How many in-app actions are they taking?
Do they like our product?
How many support tickets do they submit?
Let’s set up alerts for customers not using the product so we can reach out!
These are all good ideas. You do want to track these to measure the health of your business.
But they miss the most important point.
Which will be SO OBVIOUS after you hear it.
That’s how I felt when Francis Cordon opened my eyes to what really matters…
What To Measure Instead
Here’s the most important thing to measure related to customer success (and ultimately the overall health of your business).
It’s not how much they like or use your product.
It’s things like:
Are you making your customers better at their jobs?
What mission-critical business metric are you improving for your customer?
What does your customer get measured on?
While I was busy tracking how many emails customers sent, the customers were looking at how much revenue they created for the business.
We could even track revenue generation in our product — but that wasn’t the metric we looked at to understand customer success! 🤦♀️
What It Looks Like
Quick and dirty examples to get the wheels turning.
Marketing software → are your marketing power users generating revenue?
Faster website software → do you have more online sales?
Financial management software → is your net worth/income/saving growing? do you sleep better at night? 😉
Vertical CRM software → are revenue/profits growing?
You’ll see that it’s rarely about “efficiency” and it’s never about the functionality of the product. Yes, your product does cool automation. Users don’t care. (I know! I’m sorry!!! I love your product baby too!!) They care how your product helps them achieve something even more important that “good product adoption.” 😉
Happy to brainstorm for your business if you’re stuck. Just shoot me a note!
Start Today
Save yourself a decade.
Start now aligning everyone in the company to the metric that customers care about.
Not the in-product or revenue-related proxy metric that your company cares about.
Ideally, you want to show this North Star metric to your customer in the product.
If you’re not there yet, start leveraging Customer Win Slides asap (a good idea anyway!).
I’ve never heard from a single company who didn’t have great results from Customer Win Slides.
Yes, you still need to think about pricing and go-to-market strategy and build a good product and all those things.
But at the core, if you are helping your customer be better at the thing they truly care about, you will have a great business!
P.S. Want more customer success advice, lessons, and templates? Check out the complete guide.
What do you wish you learned 10 years ago? What startup lesson seemed so obvious in hindsight? What do you measure to track your customer’s (true!) success?
Thank you so much!!! We all need a reminder to go back to our North Stars!
You summarized it so well - help your customers be better at what they care about.
And I add that the word customer means also implicit customers.
If you are an engineer your customers are also your Customer Success team members that are interfacing with their customers.
If you do application reliability your customers are the app owners that are on the hook for offering a great experience to their customers.
Look around - those around you ARE your customers, whatever name you are giving them today.
Then apply this mindset.
This changes everything.
Thanks again!