📊 How to Conduct a Sanity Check Using 6 Essential Metrics...

5 crucial shifts from vanity metrics to sanity metrics for startups: Transition from page views to user engagement rate, from total registrations to active users, from App Store rankings to user retention rates, from total signups to conversion rates, and from pitch competition wins to actual customer accounts won. These changes help startups measure true performance and progress.

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Meet Jimmy. Jimmy is a startup founder and the media loves him. They write about him weekly and he has 100k+ followers on social media. Jimmy has raised money pre-launching his product and he wins every single pitch competition there is.

Will Jimmy’s startup be successful? It's impossible to tell. Because all we shared are vanity metrics. Metrics that make you feel good but say nothing about the prospects of the business.

Vanity metrics make part of what we like to call “startup theatre” where people (mostly evident at conferences and events) talk about startup stuff, yet not one is building successful businesses.

Now, vanity metrics aren’t useless, they’re simply misleading – giving founders a false sense of progress. Here are some vanity metrics to be cautious about and good sanity metrics to replace them with:

1. Views & impressions

• Vanity Metric: Page Views / Downloads / Impressions
• Sanity Metric: Average Time on Page / User Engagement Rate

2. User numbers & registrations

• Vanity Metric: Total Users / Registrations
• Sanity Metric: Active Users / Daily Active Users / Monthly Active Users

3. App Store rankings

• Vanity Metric: App Store Rankings
• Sanity Metric: User Retention Rate / Daily Active Users

4. Total signups

• Vanity Metric: Signups
• Sanity Metric: Conversion Rate to Paying Customers

5. Pitch competitions

• Vanity Metric: Pitch Competitions Won
• Sanity Metric: Customer Accounts Won

6. Funding rounds

• Vanity Metric: Raising More Funding
• Sanity Metric: Customer Growth Rate

Have you found any particular vanity metric a sticky one? Did we miss something? Hit reply and let us know.

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