Instructions
One of the most valuable things you can do before you launch is decide what success looks like. Not because the numbers will be perfect — they won't be — but because without a clear measure of success you'll spend the post-launch period interpreting data to match your mood. A good week feels bad because you didn't define what good meant. A bad week gets explained away because there was no threshold that forced an honest look.
The trap is measuring everything. Founders often track fifteen things at once, which means they're effectively tracking nothing. A dashboard full of charts doesn't tell you what to do. You need one number that honestly captures whether your product is creating value — and two or three supporting metrics that give it context. Then stop there, for now.
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