In biotech or hard tech businesses, your primary metric might not be revenue or active users, especially if you're still validating whether your technology works. Instead, focus on technical milestones that demonstrate progress.

Real startup progress is defined by tasks that genuinely move the needle, such as growing your primary key performance indicator (KPI), which is typically either revenue or active users.

For consumer startups, achieving at least 15% month-on-month growth in active users is ideal, with 10% being acceptable, while 5% is likely insufficient for long-term viability.

Celebrating successes and recognizing real-world impacts of our work is vital for building a strong company culture and cohesion.

If your startup has strong network effects, focusing on active users may be more important initially, with revenue becoming a focus later on. It's crucial to define what 'users' means for your startup, as it can vary significantly. For example, having 100 users could mean they just signed up or that they actively engage with your product daily for about 10 minutes. The latter is a much more valuable metric.

It's impressive when founders can fluently discuss key metrics like daily active users or annual revenue per user, as it shows they are in command of their metrics.

While revenue is often the best primary metric, some startups may focus on active users, especially if building a large audience is a prerequisite for monetization.

It's important to evaluate startups based on whether they have a small number of users who truly love the product, rather than just a large user base.

Even with many flaws, we saw incredible user growth, with 20,000 visitors in the first month, which encouraged us to keep going despite initial setbacks.