The Startup Vanity Metric Trap

Nathan Robinson
Product Coalition
Published in
5 min readOct 27, 2021

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Mousetrap. Or is it a startup founder trap?

Anyone who has worked in a job where metrics are tracked closely is no stranger to vanity metrics. Simply put, vanity metrics are metrics that make you look good to others but do not help you understand your own performance in a way that informs future strategies.

So what is the vanity metric trap of startup founders?

Funding.

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I write about Startups, Artificial Intelligence | Product Management | Problem Solving | Travel | Entrepreneurship | Decision Making | Indie Hacking