Fake startup progress includes activities like attending conferences or optimizing irrelevant metrics, which do not contribute directly to growing your primary KPI and can distract from delivering real value to customers.

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.

Having a main key performance indicator (KPI) is essential for tracking a startup's progress and determining whether the business is working or not.

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.

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.

Track a key performance indicator (KPI) that reflects your company's success; for most, this should be revenue or user engagement.

The primary metric should be a lagging indicator of success, reflecting real value delivered, like revenue from customers who have already paid for your product.

Setting the right KPIs and goals will objectively tell you if your startup is doing well, just okay, or bad, keeping you grounded and realistic about your progress.

Every startup should have a clear North Star metric that aligns the entire team towards a common goal, such as monthly active users or gross merchandise volume.