9.4 The Metrics That Matter
Most early founders track vanity metrics. Followers. Page views. App store downloads. None of that tells you whether you have a business. The only thing that matters right now is whether strangers are turning into paying customers who stick around. That process has exactly six steps, and you need a number for each one.
The funnel is: Outreach Sent, Reply Rate, Demo Booked, Trial Started, Paid, Retained. That’s it. If you can’t recite the conversion rate between each of those stages, you’re flying blind.
The Six Numbers and What They Mean
Outreach Sent to Reply Rate. Good is 15-20% for cold email or cold DM if your targeting is tight. Bad is under 5%, which almost always means your targeting is wrong, not your copy. Marcos sent 100-200 cold DMs per day to land The Birdhouse’s first $3K/month client. He didn’t get a reply on day one. But he tracked every single outreach in Notion with follow-ups. When reply rate is bad, check your list before you rewrite your message.
Reply Rate to Demo Booked. Good is 40-60% of replies converting to a scheduled conversation. Bad is under 20%, which means your call-to-action is too vague or you’re asking for too much commitment too fast. One reply that books a demo is worth ten replies that ghost you after the first exchange.
Demo Booked to Trial Started. Good is 70%+. Bad is under 50%, which usually means your demo is pitching features instead of solving a specific problem the prospect told you they have. Mark Lou booked exactly one call with an escape room business owner in Australia and closed him in 42 minutes because he came in solving a concrete pain point, not demoing a product.
Trial Started to Paid. Good is 25-40% for a product with real activation. Bad is under 15%, and it almost never means your pricing is wrong. It means users aren’t reaching the moment where the product actually works for them. Fix activation before you touch pricing.
Paid to Retained (Month 1 to Month 3). Good is 85%+ retention at 90 days. Bad is anything under 70%, which means you’re filling a leaky bucket. Nick at BlockToPin maintained that kind of retention by reviewing screen recordings when issues occurred and shipping requested features within hours. Retention isn’t a product problem at this stage, it’s an attention problem.
How to Track This Before You Need a Dashboard
Open a spreadsheet. Five columns: Date, Name, Stage, Last Action, Next Action. Every prospect gets a row. Every stage change gets logged. Add a summary tab that counts how many people are in each stage and calculates the conversion rate between them. You don’t need Salesforce. You need to know the number at each gate.
Leading vs. Lagging Indicators
Outreach Sent and Reply Rate are leading indicators. They predict what your pipeline looks like in 30 days. If you cut outreach this week, your demos will dry up next month. Trial Started, Paid, and Retained are lagging indicators. They confirm decisions you already made weeks ago.
The mistake founders make is obsessing over paid conversions when their reply rate dropped two weeks ago. By the time revenue stalls, the problem is old.
Today, build the spreadsheet. Put every active prospect in it. Calculate your conversion rate from each stage to the next. Find the stage with the worst conversion rate. That is your only job this week.