B2B Startup Metrics (Startup School)
The B2B metrics lecture: MRR, churn, and what investors will actually probe.
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.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →Growth, unit economics, and retention for consumer products, from the source.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →The classic on picking one KPI and refusing vanity metrics.
Watch on YouTube youtube.com →YC's canonical answer to which numbers matter and how to use them in decisions.
Open ycombinator.com →The short written version to revisit each planning cycle.
Open ycombinator.com →Fresh retention benchmarks including the AI-era 'smiling curve' phenomenon.
Open a16z.com →Still the best cohort-analysis explainer written for first-time SaaS founders.
Open medium.com →Shows AI building your cohort table when spreadsheets intimidate you.
Open saas.wtf →A worked churn analysis with ChatGPT you can replicate on your own export.
Open saas.wtf →Warns how AI-driven signup waves distort early retention data.
Open userpilot.com →An India-based product studio's metric list mapped to SaaS vs e-commerce.
Open f22labs.com →Jargon-free cohort mechanics aimed at founders, not analysts.
Open blog.mean.ceo →Argues for fewer numbers, better defined, matched to your stage.
Open blog.mean.ceo →The payments provider's clean explainer, handy since your revenue data lives there.
Open stripe.com →Turns cohort tables into concrete churn-reduction actions.
Open baremetrics.com →A practitioner's guide to letting AI agents monitor your metrics for you.
Open adasight.com →What to measure and build at each stage so you never over-invest early.
Open definite.app →How to set up metrics infrastructure that AI tools can actually reason over.
Open tasman.ai →The same ground, over in Grow & market, our Starting Up track.