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Comment by nathan_long | Hacker News Reader

If I could only pick one metric for a business, I'd go with net revenue. Otherwise it's an expensive hobby.

Not necessarily. In my opinion, core metric should be a proxy for the value the product provides. For example, for us at https://ouraring.com, people buy the ring before using the product.

Tracking revenue only would not reveal problems in the long-term benefit of the product - it would be more like a proxy for marketing actions, not for the core product benefit.

From another wearable founder [1] to you, congrats on making a great product! I'm wearing the new steel Oura right now. Although the firmware update this week broke it for me on android :(

Still my favorite heart-rate enabled wearable out there!

[1] https://pavlok.com

Thanks! (I’m CTO, SW at Oura, but not an Oura founder).

New firmware and Android release coming soon that likely will help with your issue

But the parent was picking one metric to measure the health of a business, not a product. If you choose to measure the health of your business by the quality of your product, aren't you just creating a potentially misleading proxy? Good products hardly guarantee the success of a business.

How you track that value?

Like most business talk on HN, this is about YC-style startups that are expected to lose a lot of money up front in exchange for a ticket in a lottery where the winner is the next Facebook.

Good point. And the fact that it's posted by a VC might have something to do with the content of the advice.

Net revenue CHANGE might be the one metric that makes sense.

The reason to track any metric is to know if you should continue, stop, or go all-in. If you are flatlining - or going down - that's a HUGE sign to quit. If you have steady growth, easy as she goes. Explosive growth, you might want to double down.

Revenue is a reflection of market value, not an intrinsic measurement. Measuring the unit economics should capture more of the intrinsic metrics that generate revenue. This would then be the essence of a company's North star metric.

Then you must love Uber, since you only care about revenue and not costs.

Net revenue often refers to net profit, meaning revenue minus expenses.

I guess YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook are expensive hobbies? They not only didn't make money, but literally lost millions for years.

Of those 3, YouTube might actually be a very expensive hobby. It is purported to still be unprofitable.

it depends. Are you raising the chicken for egg or meat? Egg is about sustainability... meat is about growth (very fast)...

Did you read TFA?

This is for pre-revenue companies. The expectation is that se will turn into revenue in many tech business models. Certainly for the type where you have to capture a dominant fraction of users to get the hockey stick curve.

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