35 Critical Startup Metrics: From Pre-Seed to Exit

If your startup is working, there will be data to prove it. 

Investors expect to see that data clearly. So does your team. 

But not all startup metrics carry weight at every stage. The ones that matter shift as your company evolves. This guide covers the most important metrics at each stage of the journey, from proving there’s a market to prepping for an exit.

Any of the 35 bolded startup metrics you see in this post is defined in the glossary at the end.

What Are Startup Metrics?

Startup metrics widely-accepted measurements of business performance. How many active users do you have? How much do you spend per user? How much revenue does your product net each month? Are these numbers trending in a healthy direction?

Startup metrics are the substance behind the story founders tell when they are fundraising or explaining decisions to their team. They are hard numbers that support claims about their product or idea.

• Our product is growing in popularity. Our user base has seen a steady 18% compound average growth rate over the last 6 months.
• People stick with our product. We saw churn decrease in each of the last six quarters.
• Existing customers are getting more value. Our net revenue retention is 110% up from 102% earlier this year.

If you gain fluency in these metrics early, it will build trust with anyone who is serious about investing their time or capital into your startup. It shows that you understand where your business is today and what you have to do to grow.

Finding the “right” startup metrics

Done right, you can select a handful of key metrics to track and ignore the noise. You can give your team clarity about what to work on and confidence that it is the most important thing for growing the business.

There are two big determining factors for selecting appropriate startup metrics:

• Your business model
• The stage of your startup

Start with your business model. What you sell and how you make money determine what you should measure.

For example, an ecommerce startup needs to focus on things like average order value, repeat purchase rate, and customer acquisition costs. These metrics help you see if your store is profitable and if customers are coming back.

For a SaaS startup, different metrics like recurring revenue, churn, and burn rate are used to assess similar objectives. Are we making money? Are customers sticking around?

The other major factor is the stage of your startup. 

Early-stage startups focus on proof: are people using the product, coming back, and finding value? As you grow, the focus shifts toward revenue and efficiency. You have to show strong financial performance and evidence that it can be sustained into the future.

Let’s take a close look at the five most important metrics for each startup stage. 

Pre-Seed Metrics: Proving There’s a Market

At this stage, the product is often little more than a prototype, wireframe, or just an idea. What founders are really building is evidence that the problem is real, there is a target audience of customers, and they are showing interest. 

Key metrics:

• Total Addressable Market (TAM)
• Waitlist signups or pre-launch leads
• Click through and landing page conversion rates
• Engagement with prototypes or demos
• Qualitative insights from feedback, surveys, and interviews

Metrics at this stage guide discovery and help you validate assumptions about what users want, what they value, and how likely they would be to use your product. 

Putting in the market research to estimate TAM helps you understand the long-term potential of your company. Rising click through rates tell you that people are more interested in your messaging. 

Investors want to see that people care enough to click, sign up, schedule a call, or say yes to a landing page. They want to see signs of a real market that has a genuine appetite for what you are building, not just inflated vanity metrics. 

Early Stage Metrics: Showing You Can Grow

At the early stage, the product is live, but the market is still developing. Founders are working to understand which users stick around, what features drive value, and how to prioritize limited resources. 

Key Metrics:

• Churn rate / customer retention 
• Burn rate
• Growth rate
• Gross margin
• Revenue (MRR or ARR, depending on model)

Taken together, these five metrics help you gauge whether your product is actually working for real users and whether the business model can scale. Revenue and growth rate are exciting, but without healthy gross margins and a manageable burn rate, that growth isn’t sustainable. 

Metrics like ARR or MRR are usually broken down by channel to see where momentum is building and where marketing dollars have the most impact. If you have a mix of monthly and annual customers, you’ll want to split that so people can see what revenue is recurring.

More than revenue though, what everyone wants to see is low churn. The more customers stay with you for a longer period of time, the more profitable every acquisition is, and the more cards you have to play moving forward. 

High customer retention metrics are a strong indicator that users find value, that your product is meeting a real need, and that people are coming back without being chased. A spike in revenue doesn’t mean much if users churn after a month.

Growth Stage Metrics: Scaling with Efficiency 

By the time you get venture funding, you are expected to have a rich view of all critical business metrics and how they are related. No longer just numbers, these metrics are levers you know how to manipulate with predictable and profitable business outcomes.

Now it is about executing at scale, growing headcount, and demonstrating efficiency at turning investment dollars into new, stable revenue. 

Key Metrics:

• Customer acquisition cost (CAC)
• Lifetime value (LTV)
• Burn multiple
• Cash runway
• Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

At this stage, the real question is: can your model stay profitable as it scales? Are you building something that still works when you double headcount? When customer acquisition gets more expensive? When your margins get squeezed?

Metrics like CAC and LTV are early warning systems. You want a strong LTV:CAC ratio (3:1 or higher is the rule of thumb) that shows you have a clear path to profitability, even when acquiring customers gets harder. 

You burn through the early adopters, competition ramps up, and your costs creep higher. That’s why customer retention is so important and NRR is such a highly valued metric. It tells you whether people are renewing, upgrading, and expanding their contracts. An NRR of 110% or higher is a strong signal that you have something people really want. 

On the other hand, if you are struggling with high churn, it’s like trying to fill a leaky bucket. It will be really hard to raise LTV if people don’t stay, which puts pressure on keeping CAC down at a time when you are trying to grow. 

A high burn multiple is not sustainable, even if top line growth and revenue numbers look great. It will frighten investors and probably keep you up at night.

Late Stage Metrics: Preparing for Acquisition or IPO

By late stage, the startup is expected to operate like a mature business. The emphasis shifts from chasing growth to maintaining consistent performance and clean financials. 

Now the metrics support a credible long-term strategy that you can communicate clearly to a variety of audiences. Public investors want predictability, your board wants to see evidence of smart capital allocation, and your leadership team needs clarity on where to focus. 

Key Metrics:

• Revenue quality
• Gross margin stability
• EBITDA
• Rule of 40 (for SaaS)
• Market share 

At the exit stage, metrics like EBITDA, gross margin stability, and revenue quality help translate your success into a language outsiders can understand. Investors and analysts are scanning for red flags: is this growth sustainable? Is it held up by one big customer? Are their margins shrinking as they expand?

One of the most common ways to evaluate late-stage SaaS companies is the Rule of 40, a simple formula that combines your revenue growth rate and your EBITDA margin. If the sum is over 40%, you’re seen as having a promising balance of growth and profitability.

More than raw numbers, forecast accuracy is the mark of a mature company. Did you hit the numbers you said you would hit? Do you do so, quarter after quarter? 

Reliable reporting reduces the perception of risk and raises the perceived value of the business. Missed targets make a business look chaotic or dependent on luck, even if the fundamentals are strong.

Startup Metrics Glossary

Here are definitions for all the startup metrics I mentioned. The goal here is to make sure we’re on the same page about terminology.

Feel free to tweak these to suit the language your team uses. Just make sure that everyone is working with the same definition for the startup metrics you use. 

• Active users: People who have meaningfully interacted with your product within a defined time frame, usually tracked as daily average users (DAU), weekly average users (WAU), or monthly average users (MAU).
• Annual contract value (ACV): The average annual value of a customer contract.
• Annual recurring revenue (ARR): The committed revenue a company expects to generate annually from recurring subscriptions.
• Annual run rate (ARR): The projected revenue based on current performance, which includes one-time revenue.
• Average order value (AOV): The average dollar amount spent per order.
• Average revenue per user (ARPU): Average revenue earned from each paying customer in a single month.
• Bookings: The total value of customer contracts signed within a specific period, regardless of when the revenue will be recognized.
• Burn rate: The average amount of cash your company spends each month. Net burn factors your incoming cash into the equation, gross burn just looks at your monthly expenses and other cash outlays.
• Burn multiple: The amount of cash you’re burning for every dollar of net new ARR.
• Cash runway: The number of months your business can operate before running out of money at the current burn rate.
• Churn: The percentage of customers or revenue lost over a period of time. 
• Compounded monthly growth rate (CMGR): The average month-over-month growth rate over a given time period. 
• Contribution margin per customer: The profit remaining from a customer after subtracting only variable costs (like hosting for SaaS, or shipping for ecommerce), and excluding fixed overhead and marketing expenses.
• Cost of goods sold (COGS): The direct costs tied to delivering your product or service.
• Customer acquisition cost (CAC): The average cost of acquiring a single new customer, including marketing, sales, and other related expenses. “Blended CAC” reports the average across channels, but it’s often broken out to show paid CAC vs. organic CAC, or into individual channels.
• Customer lifespan: The average length of time a customer stays active before churning.
• EBITDA: A company’s earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization. EBITDA margin (EBITDA/total revenue) is a common way to measure a company’s profitability.
• Gross profit: The revenue left after subtracting the direct costs of delivering your product (COGS).
• Gross margin stability: 
• Gross merchandise volume (GMV): GMV measures the total value of goods or services sold through a platform. 
• Growth rate: The percentage increase of a specific metric (like revenue, users, or transactions) over a defined period.
• Lifetime value (LTV): The estimated total revenue a customer generates over their full relationship with your business. 
• LTV:CAC: A widely-used ratio that compares expected revenues and costs of customers to benchmark profitability.
• Market share: The percentage of the total share of revenue in a specific market generated by a single company.
• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR): The predictable monthly revenue a business earns from recurring subscriptions. 
• Payback period: The number of months it takes to earn back the cost of acquiring a customer.
• Purchase frequency: How often a customer buys again in a given time period.
• Repeat purchase rate: The percentage of customers who make a second purchase.
• Revenue: The actual income recognized by the company for delivering products or services during a specific period.
• Revenue quality: Refers to how reliable, recurring, and diversified a company’s revenue is, indicating how sustainable and low-risk it is over time.
• Rule of 40: A common SaaS benchmark, where the sum of a revenue growth rate + EBITDA margin is at least 40%.
• Take rate: The percentage of GMV a platform retains as revenue
• Total addressable market (TAM): The estimated total revenue opportunity available in your market.
• Total contract value (TCV): Total value of a customer contract, including recurring revenue and any one-time fees over the contract’s life. 
• Viral coefficient (K-factor): A measurement of how many new users each existing user brings in.