Five numbers, every month, on the same slide. New signups, activation rate, free to paid conversion, net revenue retention, and blended CAC payback. Those five tell the whole story: top of funnel, whether the product works, whether the pricing works, whether customers expand, and whether the economics hold. Pipeline coverage and MQLs are the wrong language here and reporting them invites the board to manage you like a sales-led company. Add one leading indicator you genuinely believe predicts next quarter, usually activated signups rather than raw signups, and hold it constant for a year so the trend is readable. Boards forgive a bad number far more easily than a number that changed definition.
4 hand-picked resources, 1 India-specific, 4 link-checked. Pick how you want to dig in.
Why we picked it Poyar replaces the sales funnel with a five stage new user journey (discover, start, activate, convert, scale) and attaches benchmark ranges to each. It is how you find out which stage is actually broken.
From Growth Unhinged by Kyle Poyar 10 min read
Open growthunhinged.com →Why we picked it A short, specific list of what to instrument on a self-serve funnel, including time to activation and time to convert, which are the two most people forget to track at all.
From Amplitude by Carmen DeCouto 12 min read
Open amplitude.com →Why we picked it A full 0 to 100M ARR guide from an Indian company that lived it, covering acquisition, activation, retention, monetisation and the metrics for each. The best single India-built reference on self-serve.
From Chargebee 45 min read
Open chargebee.com →Why we picked it Benchmarks from 500 plus products: 34 percent average, 36 percent for SaaS. If you have ever wondered whether your number is bad or normal, this is the answer, and it is free.
From Lenny's Newsletter by Lenny Rachitsky and Yuriy Timen 12 min read
Open lennysnewsletter.com →How product-led growth reads from a different seat.
The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.
