The B2B metrics lecture: MRR, churn, and what investors will actually probe.
B2B Startup Metrics (Startup School)
Y Combinator 2024
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →Track the handful that would break your business if they moved the wrong way: revenue or MRR, retention and churn cohorts, CAC, and runway, anchored by one North Star metric. AI helps twice: it computes these from raw exports (a cohort table from a Stripe CSV in one prompt) and, inside tools like Amplitude, it now watches metrics continuously and flags anomalies. Founders tracking 30 metrics track none of them well.
18 resources.
The B2B metrics lecture: MRR, churn, and what investors will actually probe.
Y Combinator 2024
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →Growth, unit economics, and retention for consumer products, from the source.
Y Combinator Jan 2024
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →The classic on picking one KPI and refusing vanity metrics.
Y Combinator 2019
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →YC's canonical answer to which numbers matter and how to use them in decisions.
Y Combinator (Tom Blomfield) 2024
Open ycombinator.com →The short written version to revisit each planning cycle.
Y Combinator 2019
Open ycombinator.com →Fresh retention benchmarks including the AI-era 'smiling curve' phenomenon.
Andreessen Horowitz 2025
Open a16z.com →Still the best cohort-analysis explainer written for first-time SaaS founders.
Christoph Janz (Point Nine) 2019
Open medium.com →Shows AI building your cohort table when spreadsheets intimidate you.
SaaS.wtf 2024
Open saas.wtf →A worked churn analysis with ChatGPT you can replicate on your own export.
SaaS.wtf 2024
Open saas.wtf →Warns how AI-driven signup waves distort early retention data.
Userpilot 2026
Open userpilot.com →An India-based product studio's metric list mapped to SaaS vs e-commerce.
F22 Labs 2025
Open f22labs.com →Jargon-free cohort mechanics aimed at founders, not analysts.
MEAN CEO 2026
Open blog.mean.ceo →Argues for fewer numbers, better defined, matched to your stage.
MEAN CEO 2026
Open blog.mean.ceo →The payments provider's clean explainer, handy since your revenue data lives there.
Stripe 2024
Open stripe.com →Turns cohort tables into concrete churn-reduction actions.
Baremetrics 2024
Open baremetrics.com →A practitioner's guide to letting AI agents monitor your metrics for you.
Adasight 2025
Open adasight.com →What to measure and build at each stage so you never over-invest early.
Definite 2024
Open definite.app →How to set up metrics infrastructure that AI tools can actually reason over.
Tasman Analytics 2025
Open tasman.ai →The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.