What metrics are important in a Startup?

When you start the adventure of starting and setting up a startup, you always tend to measure everything and produce reports of all kinds of metrics, because that way we believe that we will not miss a single piece of information. And nothing could be further from reality, what happens is that we miss all the metrics and we don't know which ones matter, since every business has one or two at most. This doesn't mean that you should only pay attention to one, but rather focus on the right one. The question here is to identify what that metric is and focus all efforts on improving it. If you do this, the other factors will improve with it. Since not all companies are the same, the metric that matters depends on each business model. For example, in an ecommerce, the key metric has to do with aspects of the purchase, specifically with the conversion and closing part of the order. In a media and advertising business model, it would be necessary to focus on click rates, session duration, impressions, etc. In these two business models, it seems easy to identify the most important factors, but even so, these cases are hypothetical. In addition, the metric that matters in a startup evolves depending on the stage in which the company is located. In the beginning, Facebook was very aware of the virality coefficient, but right now that won't be the case. Everyone has ever looked at metrics that only increase our ego, such as the number of followers on Twitter, the number of visits to the web, etc... but this only helps us to “hesitate”. Metrics can be the basis on which to make decisions, and I don't think that these decisions have to be made taking into account the number of fans on Facebook. Another important factor is knowing how to measure, and for this, we must use metrics in the same way, since we will always have to compare them with previous periods. In short, whatever your business model, you have to focus on the metric that has the greatest impact on the evolution of the company, that improves it by large quantities and then move on to optimizing it to the maximum.“What can't be measured, can't be managed; what can't be managed, can't be improved”