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The Only Metric That Matters

Josh Elman · Medium Free Beginner

Elman helped grow Twitter, LinkedIn, and Facebook, and his rule is exactly your short answer in practice. Decide the core action, decide how often a real user should do it, then measure how many people hit that bar. His Twitter example (seven visits in a month predicts they stay) is the model for naming a metric and a threshold before you ship.

• Ask three things: are people using it, doing the core action, at the frequency you expected
• A good metric predicts whether someone keeps coming back, not just that they showed up once
• Total signups and pageviews tell you almost nothing about whether it works