What is your metric for success?
Having recently passed $1,000 MRR with Pirsch Analytics, I wondered what people consider their most important metric when measuring success?
Monthly recurring revenue is obviously standing out if you - like us - try to make a living from your product at some point in the future. Still, it might not be the number to focus on - especially if you are not (yet) offering a paid plan. What about the growth rate or the conversion rate of free trials? Or do you look for something completely different?
I would consider changing your language on this a bit... happiness is never downloads, revenue, or money in your pocket. Those things aren't bad things to measure, but you'll find the more you get the more you push the finish line down the road. As revenue grows, it's exciting but also typically adds additional stress. If your business grows and you hire, you see more stress, fear, and craziness happening.
If you are looking for what metrics to watch to make sure you are growing in the right direction: traction, revenue, and churn are a great three to measure actively.
But for success, you need to define this early! What does success mean to you? Is it selling the startup? Making a solid living with steady growth for the next 10 years? Padding (or creating!) a retirement account so you can retire some day?
I highly recommend starting with the end in mind, but giving up the excessive control on planning every step of the way. So much is out of your control on the journey but having an end in mind is important. That is what you can measure success and happiness against. And that end goal can change! But having one is the key to measuring success... at least for me! :)
Last thing I'll say... I've learned this the hard way... my company grew and great... revenue filled my account, and I chased the revenue but got lost in the end and would have crashed my business into the ground out of unhappiness. I was chasing the journey but without an end... I got very lucky in the end and it was all ok... but now I don't do anything without keeping the end in mind.
We have changed the key metrics several times as the product and marketing are evolving.
Early, we wanted to see traction and new sign-ups.
A bit later, when no paid options were available yet, we mostly looked at "conversions" (customers reaching a certain point) and heavily optimize onboarding processes to increase numbers.
Now, we watch a lot of different financial and non-financial metrics so we can understand who and how uses our service and who is most likely to pay for it and what roadblocks are there. And of course, we keep optimizing everything around based on our findings.
So the most important metric always depends on your stage and goals.
MRR is a strong metric, but I personally like growth rate more. It adds a multiplier to future MRR and can't be ignored!
I think that it should be some kind of internal metric specific to your business. For example, at Fresco we provide an online whiteboard software that enables people to collaborate in real-time. As a success metric, we track boards created (and accounts created) to show how much our product is growing and how many of those users are really interacting with the product.
My personal success metric is simply how happy I am every day.
Now, the personal happiness is driven by various factors, as an entrepreneur it's mostly knowing your customers are happy with your product. Paying for it (good revenue) is a way of knowing that they are indeed finding your product useful.
My other "success" metrics: being able to do what I want every day, improving every day (in various skills), staying healthy, learning new things.
I know the question was more about specific KPIs, but I find them to be less and less relevant in the big picture. For indie devs the KPIs are simply self-imposed, they know best individually what they want: more revenue, more users, fewer support tickets, less churn, etc.
I agree with you, being happy in what you do is very important in the long run!
This comment was deleted 4 years ago
That's true, but more cash does not equal more happiness. Cash is only important until you reach the sustainability level. Once you have enough to leave worry-free, earning more cash doesn't relate to personal happiness and not even to the success of the business or quality of the product (many products start degrading in quality trying to generate more revenue).
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Hi, How long does it takes to get 1000MRR? By the way, if I want to use Pirsch Analytics, how can I get my raw data?
How long is a piece of string?
What do you mean? How much storage a single row eats up?
My reply was to laoyan's question "How long does it takes to get 1000 MRR?"
The docs explain how to export your data: https://docs.pirsch.io/settings/general/#export-to-csv. Additionally, Pirsch has a powerful API which allows you to query data as well!
It took us one year to reach $1,000 MRR - which I would consider reasonable.
As @zepfietje already mentioned, you can either export all your data to CSV or use our API for automation.
Thanks a lot! I am considering using your product to track user events in our product. By the way, are your servers running in EU,US or both?
We are hosting in Germany only and that won't change!
Another Hetzner devotee, I see? :)
The single north pole measurement I use depends on the stage of the product.
At present, at the relatively early stage of the product we are looking at conversion rate, mainly what the percentage that reaches the bottom of the funnel(customer paid). If you ask for one measurement, this is what we look at this stage.
This helps us to calculate how good our product is as a paid product.
Increasing the monthly recurring revenue is definitely a good metric but it's also a constantly moving target as your "lifestyle inflation" will increase over time. I've started to think about success in terms of what "Energizes" me instead.
If increasing ROI by X percent means sleepless nights and being in a shitty mood for months at an end it's simply not worth it.
Number of founders helped
The number of fancy breed pet cats I can afford.
I got two:
Here is a great article on this topic — https://future.a16z.com/north-star-metrics/
MRR and Profit. All other metrics and activities should lead to those two things.
Trends that go in the right direction, be it traffic, MRR, MAU, etc.
Getting paid. Consistently.
Right now it's been download count. I check my python packages on the pepy download to see how successful it is on the daily basis.
https://pepy.tech/project/global-chem-extensions
I can guess feature interest I think based on the downloads loosely.
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This comment was deleted 4 years ago
In the early days I think there is no other answer but this.
Maybe once you start making 6 figures my answer would change but focusing on anything else in the early days might make the whole thing unsustainable.. so this is definitely my answer too.
$10k MRR or gtfo
This comment was deleted 4 years ago