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We reached 500 users! Problem is I was wrong.

Every morning I have my little indie hacking ritual:

  • I open my email client hoping to find dozens of lead asking how they can pay for my product.
  • I check all the different channels we have in Slack to see what happened during the night
  • I take a look at the Google search console to see if our SEO is getting better
  • A small look a Google analytics to see if something unusual is happening trafficwise
  • I take a look at Datadog to see if some problems happened during the night.
  • Finally, I open one Heroku data clip that plots our number of users.

Doing all this while drinking my coffee is now a daily ritual. I know that checking Google Search Engine every day makes little to no sense at all but I just can't help it.

Thing is today, we reached 500 users, and I was happy. I regularly read here about people reaching number-of-users milestone and I was happy to be able to celebrate mine too 😎.

The thing is, I was wrong, we don't have 500 users, we have 500 signups.

And it makes all the difference.

I'd rather have 100 users than 500 signups, heck I'd rather have 10 paying users than 1000 signups. To be honest I'd also be happy to have both 🤷‍♂️.

Focusing on bad metrics can lead to bad decisions and this is why from today I've decided not to daily check our number of users anymore. Checking Chargebee to see our paying customers seem more meaningful.

With ScrapingNinja we feel like we are onto something but we are just at the beginning. Let's re-focus and move on 🧗‍♂️.

Happy indie-hacking.

  1. 3

    For any business, your topline KPI 📈 (metric you religiously track) should only be one of two things:

    1. 👥 Users
    2. 💰 Revenue

    And if you're charging your users, your KPI should almost always be revenue.

    Glad you were able to come to that distinction sooner than later man.
    Hope things get better from this point on 🤙🍀

  2. 1

    I had 2 paying customers for 200 signup for the last 2 years.

  3. 1

    Counting users is still better and more valuable than counting Likes on your posts! So keep going :)

  4. 13

    This comment was deleted a year ago.

    1. 1

      You are right!

      Thank you for your input.

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