Your Dashboard Is Lying to You

I know a LinkedIn user with over 150,000 followers. Huge audience. The kind of reach most founders would kill for.

This person posts frequently about how they have no idea how to convert that following into revenue. 150,000 people, and if they all disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't change a thing. The audience isn't buying anything. They're just... there.

That's the problem with vanity metrics. They feel good. They look impressive. But if you can't convert them into something that matters, you don't have a business. You have a hobby with good analytics.

And yet, founders stare at these numbers constantly. Traffic. Followers. Likes. Page views. The dopamine hit of watching a line go up, even when that line has nothing to do with whether the company survives.

If you watched Lost, you remember the hatch.

In Season 2, the characters discover an underground station where a man named Desmond has been living alone for three years. His entire job is to enter a sequence of numbers into a computer every 108 minutes. If he doesn't, he believes the world will end.

So every 108 minutes, an alarm sounds. Desmond enters the numbers. Presses execute. The timer resets. He has no idea if it actually does anything. He has no idea what happens if he stops. He just knows this is what he's supposed to do. So he does it.

For three years.

I was working with a Series A founder a while back. A founder/CEO, still way too involved in every aspect of the operation. We were having a conversation in his tiny office, and I noticed he kept glancing at his laptop. Then I realized he wasn't just glancing. He was refreshing his dashboard. Every thirty seconds. While we were talking.

Finally I asked him: "What number are you going to see now that you didn't see 30 seconds ago? What's going to change that's going to drive what you do in the next 30 seconds? What are you looking for?"

He stared at me blankly and said, "I don't know."

He was Desmond in the hatch. Entering the numbers because that's what you do. The ritual had taken over. It had nothing to do with making decisions or running the company. It was just the thing he did. Refresh. Refresh. Refresh.

Social media trained us to care about the wrong things.

Likes. Followers. Views. Engagement. We've been conditioned to watch these numbers go up and feel like we're winning. And then we bring that same instinct into our businesses.

Traffic feels like progress. If people are showing up, something must be working, right?

The problem is that traffic is usually the first thing that moves. When you launch, when you run a campaign, when you post something that gets shared, traffic responds quickly. Website visits go up. App downloads spike. It feels like momentum.

But unless those people engage with your product, none of it matters. Website traffic is meaningless if users aren't activating. Downloads are worthless if people open the app once and never come back. Discovery is just the first step. It's not the destination.

I've seen founders get so fixated on traffic that they start optimizing for it at the expense of everything else. One founder I worked with shifted their customer acquisition strategy to focus on cheaper traffic sources. Lower cost per click. More volume. The numbers looked great on paper.

The problem was that this traffic had a low propensity to pay. They were acquiring users who would never convert. So they'd grown their top-of-funnel numbers while actually making the business worse. They'd optimized for a metric that felt good but meant nothing.

The metrics that feel urgent are rarely the metrics that matter. They're just the ones that move the fastest, which makes them the most addictive to watch.

So what should you be watching?

I work with a lot of SaaS founders in the $2-5M ARR range. Here's what I tell them to watch:

Specifically, Gross Revenue Retention. What percentage of your existing revenue are you keeping, before upsells? If you're losing customers faster than you can replace them, you're filling a leaky bucket. Median GRR for bootstrapped SaaS is around 92%. Top performers hit 98%. If you're significantly below that, nothing else matters until you fix it.

Are your customers spending more over time, or less? NRR above 100% means your existing customer base is growing even without new sales. That's a compounding engine. Below 100%, you're on a treadmill. Median is around 104% for bootstrapped SaaS companies in the $3-20M range.

That’s customer acquisition cost for the acronym challenged. How many months does it take to recoup what you spent acquiring a customer? I advise founders to aim for under 12 months. If it's taking 18+ months and you're burning cash, the math doesn't work. You're subsidizing growth with money you may not have.

Lifetime value divided by customer acquisition cost. You want this to be at least 3:1. If you're spending more to acquire customers than they're ever going to be worth, you don't have a growth problem. You have a business model problem.

Net burn divided by net new ARR. How much are you spending to generate each dollar of new revenue? Under 1.5x is attractive. Over 3x is a red flag. This is especially important if you're venture-backed and need to show capital efficiency.

Net new ARR divided by sales and marketing spend from the prior period. I tell my clients to target above 1.0. That means you're getting more than a dollar of new ARR back for every dollar you spend. Below that, you're subsidizing growth. That's fine in the short term, but it's not going to work in the long term.

Founders watch the wrong metrics. They also watch them too often.

Checking revenue daily just makes you anxious. It does nothing to make revenue grow faster. And anxious founders make bad decisions. They overreact to noise. They chase short-term bumps instead of building long-term systems.

I've watched founders panic over traffic drops on three-day weekends. Traffic dips on Saturday. Still low on Sunday. Still low on Monday because it's a holiday. By Tuesday morning, they're convinced something is broken. They want to change the marketing strategy. They want to pull budget from one channel and move it to another. They want to do something, anything, because the line went down.

And then by Wednesday, everything is back to normal. It was just a long weekend. People were outside touching grass, not staring at their phones. The panic was wasted energy, and if they'd actually made changes, those changes would have been based on nothing.

Before taking any action based on a metric, you need to be looking at a large enough window to know if what you're seeing is signal or noise. A bad day is noise. A bad week might be noise. A bad month is worth investigating.

Here's a rough framework:

Weekly: Churn, NRR, pipeline, burn rate. These move slowly enough that daily checking is pointless, but fast enough that you need to catch trends early.

Monthly: CAC payback, LTV:CAC, Magic Number, ARR growth. These are your strategic health indicators. Look at them monthly, compare to prior periods, and use them to inform bigger decisions.

Daily (if you must): Cash balance. That's it. Everything else can wait.

The test for any metric is simple: if this number changed, would I do something differently today? If the answer is no, stop looking at it.

The founder I mentioned earlier, the one refreshing every 30 seconds, eventually built a simpler dashboard. Five metrics, reviewed weekly. The rest of the noise got pushed to a monthly report that his ops lead handled (once he hired the one I found for him).

He told me later that figuring out what to track was the easy part. Breaking the habit was harder. The compulsion to check. The anxiety of not knowing what the numbers were doing at any given moment.

But here's the thing: the numbers were never going to save him. No amount of refreshing was going to make revenue go up or churn go down. The only thing that does that is actually running the company. Building the product. Talking to customers. Making decisions.

Desmond eventually stopped pressing the button. The world didn't end.

Your dashboard can wait.