Today, we’re talking about what should be your primary metric.
1. For most businesses, you should be looking at revenue. For SaaS businesses that’s usually monthly or annual recurring revenue, whereas a marketplace might measure transaction volume over time.
2. If you’re not charging or it doesn’t make sense yet, then you should focus on engagement. Engagement means people are reliant on your product — and that doesn’t always mean logging on everyday. Perhaps your power users only need to visit a couple of times a week or you’re a background service that only surfaces in emergencies.
3. Lastly, if your product isn’t live or for some reason you can’t measure engagement — maybe your service is heavily oriented around privacy — well, then you can measure distribution, e.g. app downloads or waitlist signups. But honestly, it’s nowhere as valuable an indicator as engagement or revenue.
