Growth & Strategy
Personas
SaaS & Startup
Time to ROI
Medium-term (3-6 months)
Last month, I watched a startup founder celebrate hitting 10,000 monthly active users while their revenue barely moved. Sound familiar? Their dashboard was a rainbow of climbing metrics - MAU, page views, trial signups, email open rates. Everything was going up and to the right, except the one number that actually mattered: paying customers.
Here's the uncomfortable truth I've learned after working with dozens of SaaS startups: most founders are optimizing for metrics that feel good but don't drive business results. The industry has created a culture of vanity metrics that make us feel productive while our actual business stagnates.
After analyzing the marketing strategies of multiple B2B SaaS clients, I discovered something that changed how I approach SaaS acquisition entirely. The metrics everyone obsesses over - traffic, clicks, impressions - are often inversely correlated with revenue growth.
In this playbook, you'll discover:
Why traditional marketing metrics mislead SaaS founders into bad decisions
The 5 metrics that actually predict revenue (and why most tools don't track them properly)
How I helped clients increase revenue by deliberately ignoring popular metrics
A simple framework to identify which metrics matter for your specific business model
Why "growth at all costs" thinking destroys sustainable SaaS businesses
The Standard
What every SaaS founder tracks obsessively
Walk into any SaaS startup and you'll see the same dashboard metrics plastered across monitors. The industry has standardized around a core set of "growth metrics" that every founder, investor, and marketer obsesses over:
The Holy Trinity of SaaS Metrics:
Monthly Active Users (MAU) - The vanity metric king
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) - Often miscalculated
Lifetime Value (LTV) - Based on assumptions, not reality
Then comes the supporting cast: trial conversion rates, churn rates, Net Promoter Score, monthly recurring revenue growth, and dozens of engagement metrics. Every SaaS analytics tool pushes these same numbers because they're easy to calculate and look impressive in investor decks.
This conventional wisdom exists for good reasons. VCs need standardized metrics to compare investments. These numbers help track progress over time. They provide benchmarks against competitors. The frameworks feel scientific and data-driven.
But here's where the system breaks down: these metrics optimize for growth theater, not sustainable business building. They encourage short-term thinking that often destroys long-term value. When founders chase MAU growth, they often sacrifice user quality. When they optimize CAC, they miss distribution channels that don't fit the formula.
The real problem? Most of these metrics measure activity, not outcomes. They tell you what happened, not what will drive future revenue. They create an illusion of control while the actual business fundamentals remain invisible.
Consider me as your business complice.
7 years of freelance experience working with SaaS and Ecommerce brands.
I experienced this metrics obsession firsthand while working with a B2B SaaS client that had built what looked like a successful growth engine. Their dashboard was beautiful - trial signups were increasing month over month, their content was driving thousands of visits, and their email sequences had impressive open rates.
But something was fundamentally broken. Despite all the positive signals, revenue growth had plateaued. They were acquiring plenty of trial users, but very few converted to paid plans. The founder was frustrated because "everything looked good" according to industry best practices.
My first move was diving deep into their analytics, and what I found was a classic case of misleading attribution. Most of their "direct" conversions had no clear source. The tracking was giving them a false sense of what was working.
Here's what really opened my eyes: when I started analyzing their actual paying customers, I discovered that most quality leads weren't coming from their celebrated marketing campaigns. They were coming from the founder's personal branding efforts on LinkedIn - activity that wasn't being tracked or measured in their fancy analytics setup.
The expensive SEO content that looked great in traffic reports? It brought in users who barely engaged with the product. The paid ads that had "acceptable" CAC numbers? Those users had terrible retention rates. The email campaigns with high open rates? Most subscribers never became customers.
This was my "aha" moment about SaaS metrics. We were treating the business like an e-commerce operation - optimizing for transactions - when SaaS is fundamentally different. You're not selling a one-time purchase; you're asking someone to integrate your solution into their daily workflow. The metrics that matter for e-commerce don't apply to subscription businesses.
The wake-up call came when we realized that cold traffic needed significantly more nurturing before converting, but our metrics were optimized for immediate gratification rather than relationship building.
Here's my playbook
What I ended up doing and the results.
Once I understood the problem with traditional metrics, I developed a completely different approach to measuring SaaS marketing success. Instead of chasing vanity numbers, I focused on what I call "Revenue Leading Indicators" - metrics that actually predict future business outcomes.
The Revenue-First Metrics Framework:
1. Source Quality Score
Instead of measuring total traffic or signups, I started tracking the lifetime value by acquisition source. This revealed that some channels brought in users who stayed for years, while others churned within weeks. The "expensive" channels often had the best long-term economics.
2. Engagement Depth Over Breadth
Rather than tracking MAU, I measured how deeply users engaged with core features. A user who completed key workflows multiple times was infinitely more valuable than someone who logged in once and never returned. This shifted focus from acquisition to activation.
3. Trust Building Velocity
For B2B SaaS, trust development is everything. I started measuring how quickly prospects moved through trust indicators: from anonymous visitor to email subscriber to trial user to reference customer. This revealed the real conversion funnel, not the artificial one in our CRM.
4. Revenue Cohort Analysis
Instead of looking at aggregate growth numbers, I analyzed revenue patterns by customer cohorts. This showed which acquisition periods generated sustainable growth versus temporary spikes. Some "successful" months actually brought in customers who churned quickly.
5. Distribution Authenticity Metrics
Traditional attribution misses the complex customer journey. I developed ways to measure authentic word-of-mouth, repeat engagement with content, and organic discovery patterns. These indicated real market fit better than any paid campaign metrics.
The Implementation Process:
First, I stopped looking at daily or weekly metrics for most indicators. SaaS businesses have longer cycles, and short-term fluctuations create false signals. Monthly and quarterly views revealed actual patterns.
Second, I connected every metric to revenue outcomes with specific timeframes. If a metric couldn't predict revenue within 3-6 months, I questioned whether it belonged in our core dashboard.
Third, I prioritized qualitative insights alongside quantitative data. Customer interviews often revealed why certain cohorts succeeded while others failed - insights that pure metrics couldn't provide.
The biggest change was shifting from "growth at all costs" to "sustainable growth" thinking. This meant accepting lower overall numbers in exchange for higher-quality metrics that correlated with long-term business success.
Key Discovery
The metrics that looked impressive in dashboards were often inversely correlated with actual business outcomes
Quality Framework
Developed a source quality scoring system that revealed lifetime value patterns invisible to traditional tracking
Attribution Reality
Discovered that most valuable customers came from unmeasured sources like founder personal branding and word-of-mouth
Revenue Cohorts
Analyzing customer cohorts by acquisition period revealed which "successful" campaigns actually generated sustainable growth
The results of this metrics shift were dramatic, though they took time to become visible. Within three months of focusing on revenue-leading indicators instead of vanity metrics, the client started making fundamentally different strategic decisions.
Immediate Changes:
Stopped expensive paid ad campaigns that brought in low-quality users
Doubled down on founder content that wasn't showing up in attribution reports
Redesigned onboarding to focus on engagement depth rather than speed
Shifted content strategy from traffic generation to trust building
Long-term Impact:
By month six, revenue quality had improved significantly. While total user numbers grew more slowly, revenue per customer increased and churn decreased. The business became more predictable and sustainable.
Most importantly, decision-making became clearer. Instead of being paralyzed by contradictory metrics, the team could focus on activities that directly influenced the numbers that mattered for long-term business health.
The founder later told me this approach "saved the company" because it prevented them from scaling ineffective strategies that would have burned through their runway while generating impressive-looking but meaningless metrics.
What I've learned and the mistakes I've made.
Sharing so you don't make them.
Here are the top lessons learned from completely rethinking SaaS marketing metrics:
Metrics shape behavior - Whatever you measure becomes what your team optimizes for, regardless of business impact
Attribution is mostly fiction - The customer journey is too complex for simple tracking, especially in B2B where decisions involve multiple touchpoints over months
Quality beats quantity - 100 engaged users who become advocates are worth more than 10,000 users who churn quickly
Timing matters more than totals - Monthly trends reveal more about business health than daily fluctuations or cumulative totals
Context is king - The same metric can be positive or negative depending on your business model, market, and growth stage
Qualitative insights beat quantitative precision - Understanding why customers succeed reveals more than measuring how many succeed
Revenue-leading indicators exist - You can predict future revenue, but not with the metrics most tools emphasize
The biggest mistake is treating SaaS like e-commerce. Subscription businesses require completely different measurement approaches because the goal isn't completing transactions - it's building ongoing relationships.
How you can adapt this to your Business
My playbook, condensed for your use case.
For your SaaS / Startup
For SaaS startups, focus on these implementation steps:
Track engagement depth over breadth - measure feature adoption and workflow completion
Analyze customer cohorts by acquisition source and time period
Measure trust-building velocity through your marketing funnel
Connect every metric to revenue outcomes within 3-6 months
For your Ecommerce store
For e-commerce stores, adapt these principles:
Focus on customer lifetime value by acquisition channel, not just first purchase
Measure repeat purchase patterns and brand loyalty indicators
Track authentic engagement like reviews, referrals, and social sharing
Analyze seasonal cohorts to understand true customer behavior patterns