Watching acquaintances raise funding around metrics like “viewership”, “engagement”, “reach”, and “accounts” has made me especially weary of companies espousing some kind of Golden Metric (big red flag if they don’t mention earnings/money) as a means to justify they are an awesome business.<p>It’s just too easy to “fudge the numbers” and give the very-best-case estimates that don’t incorporate uncertainty or sensitivity (or reflect reality). It just takes some non-half-assed due diligence to do a sanity check.<p>> <i>”We had 100k new users signup in January”</i><p>> “How many were still active a month later?”<p>> <i>”... 17k”</i><p>...<p>> <i>”Our users read an average of 12 stories per day”</i><p>> “What counts as a ‘read’?”<p>> <i>”Spending at least 3 seconds on a page”</i><p>It never gets old the stretches people will make to try to pitch something that is in desperate need of legs to stand on, so whatever metric that looks the best is the one pulled out of the hat.