🚀 Which metrics actually matter pre-product market fit?

3 tactics on tracking metrics before PMF

🎯 Define and track your leading indicator of retention (LIR)

• Select one metric that is indicative of a customer deriving value (your LIR). It should be: 

  • Observable and measurable (yes/no per customer)

  • Tied to value (not just usage or signups)

  • Predictive of retention (even if directionally at first)

  • Examples: 

    • For Slack: teams sending 2,000+ messages in the first 30 days

    • For a telemedicine platform: conduct 10 video conferences with patients within 1 month

    • For a workflow product: creating and reusing 3+ workflows in the first 30 days

• Validate your LIR by comparing the actual retention rates of customers acquired 12–18 months ago, segmented by whether they achieved the LIR or not

• Don’t wait for perfection; choose a hypothesis, measure it, and refine it

⏱️ Measure Time-to-Value (TTV)

• Track these attributes:

  • Is the customer in your currently defined ICP?  (Yes/No)

  • Expected and actual date of go live (creates a sense of urgency, especially for enterprise products)

  • How long it takes new customers to hit the target LIR (your TTV)

    • If it takes too long for customers to get value (even if they eventually do), you’re already at risk of churn

• Aim to shorten TTV before scaling up by improving product clarity, onboarding and customer experience

🩺 Conduct a weekly customer health rollup

• Review every active customer weekly to confront reality before problems compound:

  • Are they active?

  • How far are they from hitting the target LIR?

  • Are there any open issues, support tickets and/or bugs reported?

  • Assign a clear health status (Healthy, Stuck, At Risk)

• Keep it simple with a simple spreadsheet; you don’t need a full analytics stack yet

2 traps to avoid

🚨 Optimizing for efficiency metrics too early

• Efficiency metrics (e.g. CAC, LTV, gross margin, and burn multiple) only matter after nailing value creation and retention

• Optimizing too early = polishing a funnel that doesn’t work yet

• Make it work first, then make it efficient

🚨 Tracking everything instead of what actually matters

• Page views, signups, social mentions going up ≠ proof the business works

• Stop tracking if a metric doesn’t answer “Are customers getting real, repeatable value from your product?”

• Early-stage metrics should be "high-signal"; directly guiding whether to change onboarding, tweak a feature, or double down on a specific customer segment

1 tool to leverage

📖 Best practice on tracking LIR

• 60–80% of customers achieving LIR is a strong signal of having product market fit

• Use Stage 2's LIR Journey Worksheet to track customers level LIR

Bonus: 1 trend to spark startup ideas

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