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Excellent point! Most companies I’ve worked at have 3 or 4 key metrics to optimize.

For example, a goal on customer count, one on revenue, another on churn

All three represent different levers to improve the biz

I really like how you focused on ARPU and not just total subs.

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Great post - and thanks for the shout-out CJ!

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Excellent post, CJ!

One kinda related thing it brought to mind was the idea of paired metrics. For teams (or even companies), it can be useful to have two metrics as primary goals (vs. just one, which seems much more common) that are hard to improve at the same time. That keeps the team from over-rotating toward one goal at the risk of harming a whole bunch of other parts of the product or business. I think the importance of this is dialed up if the company bases compensation on hitting those targets.

In the streaming world, whenever we set a goal for active viewers, we would pair that with engagement per viewer. For paid subscriber targets, we would pair that with a goal for revenue per subscriber (to avoid abusing discounts or stretching the definition of "paid" subscriber).

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Wow this article is so good. So important to identify the vanity metrics in Procurement world.

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Love the post!

I'd add one more - aspirational unit economics.

I knew a Series B where the founders operated on vanity unit economics based on customers adopting every product in the suite and being acquired through their cheapest marketing channel (this had happened like once) until they ran out of cash.

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Great post! Essential topic for any business analyst. Thanks for sharing

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