growth rate says 41% month over month because i went from 17 customers to 24, what do you watch at this size

track absolute net new mrr in currency, not percentages, until the base is big enough that a single customer cannot move the rate by five points. at twenty four customers one cancellation is four percent of your base, so the percentage is measuring individual humans and calling it a trend. i plot net new dollars per month as bars and a three month trailing average as a line, and that chart has never lied to me.

the metric that actually earned its place for me at this stage was retention by signup cohort, even with tiny cohorts. it answers whether the people who joined three months ago are still here, which is the only question that predicts anything, and it is not distorted by how many people signed up last week.

if you do want a growth number, break it into its components rather than reporting the net. new, expansion, contraction, churned, then net. the net alone hides the case where you added six and lost five, which is a completely different business situation from adding one and losing none even though both print the same growth rate.

i celebrated a sixty percent month publicly, then the following month was negative and i spent a fortnight convinced the product was dying. nothing had changed either month. small numbers produce large emotions and the only fix was switching my weekly check in to a customer count and a cash balance.

some defence of the percentage, though. it is useless month to month at your size, but smoothed over a quarter it is the first thing that tells you a stall is structural rather than seasonal. i would not throw it out, i would stop looking at it monthly and put it on a quarterly review instead.

net new customers and net new dollars. everything else at twenty four customers is astrology.