Lean AI

Chapter 7. Key Metrics for Startup Growth

Artificial intelligence and machine learning aside, it’s important to know what growth metrics are critical to your startup to give clear success goals for your “intelligent machine” to target.

In startups, the growth team is responsible for acquisition, retention, and monetization of new customers as they evolve down the marketing funnel. Therefore, it’s important to have specific input metrics to enable you to measure success and benchmark the trend of whether you’re getting better or worse over time in meeting and exceeding those KPIs.

The complex interplay between KPI metrics grows as your marketing investment increases, making AI a perfect way to automate your campaigns as your growth accelerates. In this chapter, we’ll look at five key metrics that are most relevant for optimizing paid user acquisition budgets with an intelligent machine to help optimize the different key levers like bids, budgets, channels, creative and A/B testing across the entire marketing funnel to better meet and exceed those goals. These KPIs are among those that occur with enough data points, at a high enough frequency, and they’re consistent across a range of customer acquisition and growth goals.

The added benefit of using these key metrics is that they are simple to understand for everyone in the company as well as the investors in the business who can benchmark these against other similar startups.

Customer Acquisition Cost

The CAC measures the cost ...