Five metrics worth watching before you have revenue
Before revenue, most dashboards measure activity rather than progress. Five numbers that show whether it is working, and four that waste your attention.
·4 min read·DataSpice· Updated
Before revenue there is no scoreboard, so founders build one out of whatever is lying around. Usually that is pageviews, followers and signups, because all three are easy to increase and all three feel like progress. They are activity. Activity is what you did. Progress is whether it worked, and the gap between them is roughly the gap between being busy for eighteen months and building something.
Five numbers. Each one can go down, which is the property that makes it useful.
1. Arrivals you could repeat on purpose
Not visits. Arrivals from a source you could deliberately do again next week. A Hacker News front page is not repeatable. A newsletter you write is. A page that ranks is. A friend posting about you is not.
Take your traffic report, remove everything you cannot cause on purpose, and look at what is left. For most pre-revenue products the honest answer in month one is close to zero, and knowing that is worth more than a chart of a spike. The number you are trying to move is the repeatable share, not the total.
2. The conversion rate of the one page that asks
Sitewide conversion rate is close to meaningless, because it averages across audiences with nothing in common. Somebody reading your blog was not asked for anything, so including them tells you how your traffic mix changed and nothing else.
Measure the page that makes the request. Of the people who reached the page with the signup form on it, how many started? That number is about your product and your copy, and it moves when you change either. Blog readers who never reached that page are a different question. A good one, but not this one.
When it is low the diagnosis is almost always one of three things: the page did not say what the thing does, it asked for too much too early, or the visitor was never a candidate. Those have different fixes and only the third is a traffic problem.
3. Time to first value
The share of new accounts that reach the moment your product does the thing it exists to do, and how long it took them.
You have to define that moment yourself and the definition should be uncomfortably specific. Not "used the product". For an analytics tool it might be *the first real pageview arriving from the user's own site*, because everything before that is setup and nothing after it is doubt. For a writing tool it might be the first document exported. For a scheduling tool, the first booking made by somebody other than the account owner.
Two rules. Write it down where other people can see it. And do not move it. A definition that shifts each quarter produces a chart that cannot show a trend, only your changing opinion of yourself.
4. The week-two return rate
Of the people who signed up in a given week, how many came back the following week? This is the earliest signal that is genuinely hard to fake.
Signups measure your pitch. Returns measure your product. A launch can produce hundreds of signups and a return rate near zero, and the reading of that is not "we need more traffic". It is that the pitch was better than the thing, which is a much more useful and much less comfortable finding.
Track it by signup cohort rather than in aggregate. Aggregate return rate rises on its own as your best users pile up, which makes it a number that improves while nothing improves.
5. What the next hundred arrivals cost
Even with no advertising budget, acquisition has a price, and it is usually paid in hours. If a post takes six hours to write and brings two hundred people over a month, that is thirty-three arrivals per hour of your time. It is a rough number and it does not need to be better than rough.
What it gives you is a comparison between the things you could do next. Most founders have a strong intuition about which channel is working and it is frequently wrong, because the memorable channel is the one that produced the exciting day rather than the one that produces steadily. Once revenue exists this becomes customer acquisition cost. Before revenue it is the same question with your hours as the currency.
Four pre-revenue metrics that waste your attention
Pageviews. Goes up when you publish. Says nothing about whether publishing helped.
Total signups. A cumulative number can only go up, which makes it a chart that always looks like success.
Followers and impressions. Measures the platform's distribution decisions this week, not your product.
Time on page. Confused readers and engrossed readers produce the same figure and you cannot tell them apart.
How to put the five pre-revenue metrics on one screen
Five numbers, reviewed weekly, somewhere you actually look. Not a dashboard with forty tiles, because those get built once and never opened again. Write the five down, review them on the same day each week, and note in one line what you changed since the last review. After six weeks that note is the most valuable document you own, because it is the only record connecting what you did to what happened.