Key Takeaways

• Business metrics should reflect strategic goals, not surface-level growth. Founders must move beyond vanity metrics and focus on KPIs that align with their business model and customer value.
• Your North Star Metric is your compass. Identifying and rallying your team around one powerful metric helps ensure everyone is working toward the same impact.
• Leading indicators predict success. While lagging metrics show past performance, leading indicators give founders the opportunity to act proactively and drive better outcomes.
• Custom-fit metrics are more powerful than generic ones. Every startup is unique—metrics should be tailored to reflect your product type, industry, and growth stage.
• Reviewing and refining metrics is key to long-term success. The right KPIs will evolve as your business scales, so treat metric evaluation as an ongoing strategic process.

Your business is growing—but are you measuring what truly matters? Founders often get caught in the seductive trap of vanity metrics: flashy numbers like social media followers, app downloads, or website visits. These can look impressive in pitch decks, but they rarely tell the whole story. The real question every founder should ask is: Are these numbers driving meaningful growth or just boosting egos?

Whether you’re leading a startup or scaling an established digital product, choosing the right business metrics is crucial. The right key performance indicators (KPIs) don’t just help you track progress—they help you make smarter decisions, align your team, attract the right investors, and stay laser-focused on your goals.

In this blog, we’ll walk through a step-by-step process to help you identify, define, and implement the business metrics that will move the needle. Let’s dive in.

What Are Business Metrics and Why Should Founders Care?

Before diving into how to choose them, let’s clarify what we mean by business metrics.

Business metrics, also known as KPIs (key performance indicators), are quantifiable measures used to track the performance of a company’s activities. Unlike vanity metrics—which might make your growth look better than it actually is—real business metrics are directly tied to your strategic objectives.

For founders, choosing the right metrics isn’t just a matter of reporting. It’s about aligning your business model, product strategy, and customer experience with measurable outcomes. Without them, you're flying blind.

For example:

• If you're running a SaaS product, tracking Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) tells you whether your customer base is growing in a sustainable way.

-If you're launching a mobile app, monitoring Day 1 and Day 7 retention shows whether users are finding real value quickly.

• If you operate an eCommerce platform, conversion rate reveals how well your site turns traffic into actual sales.
• If you're building a two-sided marketplace, match rate (how often buyers and sellers successfully connect) is a key sign of marketplace health.

Choosing Business Metrics That Drive Real Growth

When it comes to scaling a startup, not all numbers are created equal. Founders need more than just analytics—they need clarity. The right business metrics can transform scattered efforts into focused execution, helping you understand what’s working, what’s not, and where to go next.

In the following steps, we’ll walk through a proven process to help you identify and implement metrics that actually move the needle.

Step 1: Start With Your Business Goals

Every meaningful metric is rooted in a business goal. Are you aiming for rapid user acquisition? Sustainable revenue growth? Reduced churn? Increased customer satisfaction?

Here’s where many founders stumble: they track too many metrics or the wrong ones. Instead, clarify your short-term and long-term goals first. These might include:

• Reaching product-market fit
• Reducing customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Improving user engagement or retention
• Scaling monthly recurring revenue (MRR)
• Optimizing operational efficiency

Once these goals are clear, it becomes much easier to identify which metrics align with them. For example, if your goal is sustainable revenue growth, you might track LTV (lifetime value), CAC, and MRR rather than just raw signup numbers.

Step 2: Define Your North Star Metric

Every founder should know their North Star Metric—the one number that best captures the core value your product delivers to users.

This isn’t just a popular growth hack—it’s a strategic anchor. Your North Star Metric helps align the entire company around a single goal and drives cross-functional focus. For Airbnb, it was nights booked. For Facebook in its early days, it was daily active users.

To define yours, ask:

• What is the main value my customers get from my product or service?
• How can I measure that value consistently?
• Does this metric reflect long-term engagement or revenue potential?

For example, if you're a SaaS platform helping small businesses manage payroll, your North Star Metric might be “payrolls successfully processed per customer per month.” That metric cuts through noise and highlights whether your users are finding repeat value.

Step 3: Identify Leading vs Lagging Indicators

Not all metrics are created equal. One of the most powerful distinctions in business analytics is between leading and lagging indicators.

• Lagging indicators measure past performance (e.g., revenue, profit, churn rate).
• Leading indicators predict future outcomes (e.g., product usage, onboarding completion, sales pipeline volume).

As a founder, focusing only on lagging indicators can cause you to react too late. Instead, supplement them with leading indicators that can guide proactive action.

For instance, if customer churn is a lagging indicator, a leading indicator could be the number of support tickets opened in the first week. If that number spikes, you can intervene before churn happens. This creates a more responsive, data-driven business.

Step 4: Customize Metrics to Your Business Model

Don’t just copy-paste metrics from another startup's pitch deck. Your metrics must reflect the uniqueness of your industry, audience, and growth stage.

A SaaS business will track very different KPIs than an e-commerce brand or a two-sided marketplace. Here’s a breakdown:

• SaaS: MRR, churn rate, CAC, LTV, product engagement
• eCommerce: conversion rate, AOV (average order value), cart abandonment rate, return rate
• Marketplaces: liquidity, match rate, buyer/seller retention
• Mobile apps: DAU/MAU ratio, session duration, retention cohorts

You might even need to invent a few custom metrics. For example, at Lizard Global, we’ve seen clients succeed with unique metrics like “feature adoption velocity” or “cost per activated user”—custom KPIs that reveal product stickiness and operational efficiency.

Step 5: Align Metrics With Your Teams and Tools

Your KPIs should not live in a dusty spreadsheet or forgotten analytics dashboard. Once you've chosen the right business metrics, they need to be integrated into team workflows, decision-making, and company rituals.

Here’s how:

• Embed KPIs into OKRs: Make metrics a core part of team goals and reviews.

• Use the right tools: Platforms like Mixpanel, Amplitude, HubSpot, or even custom dashboards can automate and visualize metrics for real-time insight.

• Keep metrics visible: Post them on team dashboards, review them in stand-ups, and celebrate wins.

Just as importantly, educate your teams on “why" these metrics matter. When everyone—from developers to marketers—understands the “why,” your business becomes more aligned and data-literate.

Step 6: Revisit and Refine Regularly

Your business isn’t static—your metrics shouldn’t be either. As you grow, your product matures, your users evolve, and your market shifts. That’s why founders need to treat metric evaluation as an ongoing process.

Set quarterly or bi-annual check-ins to ask:

• Are our KPIs still aligned with our goals?
• Have any become irrelevant or misleading?
• Are we measuring too much or too little?

You may start with metrics like activation rate and CAC, but as your product matures, you might shift focus to NPS (Net Promoter Score), customer retention, or expansion revenue.

Refinement is not failure—it’s strategic evolution.

How Lizard Global Helps Founders Track What Truly Matters

At Lizard Global, we understand that choosing the right business metrics isn’t just about analytics—it’s about aligning metrics with your product vision, market fit, and growth strategy.

We help founders and digital product teams:

• Identify your North Star Metric and supporting KPIs
• Design custom dashboards that surface actionable insights in real time

• Optimize user journeysbased on behavior-driven metrics

• Integrate analytics tools like Mixpanel, Firebase, GA4, and more

• Validate metrics through A/B testing, customer interviews, and rapid prototyping

Whether you're a startup founder launching your MVP or a scale-up refining your monetization strategy, we help you move beyond vanity metrics and make data work for you.

Ready to take your product growth to the next level with meaningful metrics? Let’s build something great together—connect with the experts at Lizard Global and let’s build something meaningful—together.