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Michael Seibel: Why Metrics Are Everything (And How Most Founders Get Them Wrong)

By Michael Seibel · Product & Building · 1 min read

Seibel says if you are not tracking metrics weekly, you are flying blind. And most founders are flying blind.

Key Points

Track your core metric weekly. Not monthly. Weekly.
Pick one primary metric. Revenue, users, or retention — not all three.
If the metric is not improving week over week, change what you are doing.

If you are not looking at your metrics every week, you do not have a startup. You have a hobby.

Weekly or Nothing

Monthly metrics are too slow. By the time you see a problem, a month is wasted.

Seibel says track weekly. Plot it on a graph. Look at the trend.

If it is going up, keep doing what you are doing. If not, change immediately.

One Metric

Seibel: It's one of the number one things that people do wrong — they don't set up metrics correctly early on.

Pick one. The one that matters most right now.

For pre-PMF startups: retention. For post-PMF: revenue. One metric. Total focus.

Setting up metrics is super important early because it's how you know whether your product is being used or not.

Change Fast

If the metric is flat for two weeks in a row, something is wrong.

Do not wait for a month. Do not hope it fixes itself.

Change something. Anything. Test a new approach. The metric tells you if it worked.