How to set KPI and Prioritize your Time

KPI and Prioritization for early stage startup

• Main goal of a founder: Get to your product market fit as quickly as possible
• When we move fast, it’s important to work on the right things (run fast on right direction)
• Prioritize tasks that move you toward your KPIs faster
  • Prioritization = working on goals that has the most impact on your KPI
• Things that make us feel busy (avoid this)
  • Optimizing paperwork tasks (good enough is all you needed)
  • Unnecessary perfectionism
  • Premature optimization (building for scale that you don’t need to yet)
  • Not building what your users want

How to prioritize your time in the startup

• Speed matters
• Align with your co-founder on expectation

Setting the right KPI goals for prioritization

• Reason: remind you of urgency of growing fast
• Early growth compounds remind you of this

1. Identify top KPIs
   • if you pre-launch, your short term KPI might be number of conversation with users
   • If you launch, your primary KPI should be revenue growth
   • Set weekly KPI goals (eg: 10 more paying customer next week)
2. Identify biggest bottleneck
   • Example:
     • By focusing on this problem SuprDaily realize high intent user dropping out because they want specific milk brand that not exists in the app, not UI or App friction issue.

Simple System to move your KPIs

1. Write down ideas that may help (don’t work on it immediately)
   • Rank & choose a few (pick a couple things and meassure the complexity)
2. If your KPI doesn’t move, be honest on why
3. Do honest retros; learn and adjust course
   • Are you predicting impact and complexity well?
     • If it wasn’t working, do something different
   • Did you complete all the task you expecting to complete in the sprint?
     • if it was working, double down
4. Move fast
   • Insanity: doing the same thing over and over but expecting different result
   • Don’t let indecision slow you down; just pick a path and keep moving
     • Ideally you’re going to be growing fast
     • If not:
       • Talk to a lot of users fast
       • Churn through your bad idea fast so you can get working on the right good ideas as fast as possible

5 Things that should & should not end up on your task list

• Things that should be on your list
  • Talking to user / responding to customer support message
  • Building features you know your customer will pay for
  • Getting user to pay for what you’ve built
• Things that should probably not be on your list (a.k.a fake progress)
  • Investor “coffees”
    • Don’t do this if you are not actively fundraising
  • Conferences
  • Arbitrary technical milestones
    • eg: optimizing benchmark, launching android apps
    • Don’t do this if you are not clearly from your user that this is burning pain point
• Common mental traps
  • Checking things off a list feels good
    • eg: optimizing paper or legal work, corporation, equity
  • It’s easy to convince yourself something is working when it isn’t
    • Be honest and admit with yourself & other if something doesn’t work out
    • Diagnosing problem early and often
  • Perfectionism and indecision are your enemy: fast decisions are good decisions
    • In reality most decision don’t matter
    • And for the one that do it’s ok to decide wrong first and fix it later and keep moving
  • Mitigating downside (rather than chasing upside) can feel falsely urgent
    • fixing little problem (it’s easy but rarely where the innovation happened)
    • Chasing upside required risk taking, creativity, a lot of false start, so get in to as many iteration as you can
    • Do things that don’t scale as long as it working and spend time to know what your user need
  • Working on secondary problems instead of the existential one
• Prioritization Recap
  • You’ll never get to everything on your task list
  • Use KPIs to prioritize your work
  • Be honest with yourself; fail fast

Choosing the right KPIs for your startup

• Primary Metric
  • This is the metric that unequivocally tells you if your business is working
  • Most commonly revenue growth
• Secondary Metric
  • Things that need to be tracked to make sure you’re not cheating/gaming your primary metric (3 or 5 secondary KPI is enough), example:
    • Retention / churn
    • Unit economic (making money of each user rather and not giving away free money then and calling it growth)
    • Acquisition cost and payback period
• Vanity Metrics (pride / don’t prioritize this metrics)
  • Amount raised
  • Team size
  • Office space
  • Press hits
  • Celebrity endorsements
  • Instagram likes
• Example good growth

1. Both has laser focus on order volume
2. When Rickshaw has trouble fundraise; they try to optimize growth and unit economic at the same time based on fear; it’s split focus decision make them slow and can kill startups

How to set target

• From Paul Graham
  • 5-7% WoW (week over week) = good
  • 10% WoW = exceptional
• Early growth matters
  • Growth rate compounds
• Factor to consider
  • Latent demand may boost early growth
  • Length of sales cycle
  • Organic vs paid user acquisition
  • Retention / Engagement
    • We need to focus both on retention and acquisition new user
    • Prioritize the one that will impact your startup

Setting targets - Top down & Bottom up

• Compounding matter so set a target and obssesed over it
• Top Down
  • Pick a milestone / date in future that you want / need to hit
    • eg: $5000 MRR by the end of startup school
  • Work backwards from this for bi-weekly goals
• Bottom Up
  • What is realistic for you to get done next week?
  • Work up from this to determine a realistic future milestone
  • Practice:
    • What can we achieve with unlimited funding?
    • What can we do next week with limited money and resources?
    • What creative ways can we still achieve that even with limited funding
• Non-revenue KPI (Maybe tempting but not always right)
  • CAC / LTV (Customer)
    • Focus on payback period
      • Ideally it should be 0 ($0 spent on CAC where customer profitable on day 1)
      • Get a sense for how quickly user can payback the CAC (if we spent some money)
  • Free Sign-sup / DAUs
    • Only if your product requires a network effect
      • Get paid user on day one or at least don’t count free user as your growth
  • Exceptions to to revenue KPIs: Hard Tech
    • eg: hardware, biotech, enterprise business with long cycle

Notes

[1] Thanks to Y Combinator for many of the frameworks and mental models referenced here. Their essays, talks, and office hours have helped shape how early-stage founders think about speed, KPIs, and product-market fit.

[2] The SuprDaily example is drawn from a YC founder talk where they shared their learning about high-intent users and bottlenecks. The takeaway: focus on real user friction, not assumptions.

[3] Paul Graham’s benchmark for startup growth — 5–7% per week is good, 10% is exceptional — comes from his essay Startup = Growth. It’s a great north star for founders early on.

[4] “Doing things that don’t scale” is a classic lesson from PG. Early success often looks unscalable — replying to every user manually, hand-holding onboarding — but it’s where insight and traction come from.