"How should you measure if your manual efforts are effective? Focus on growth rate rather than absolute numbers. Then you won’t be dismayed if the absolute numbers are small at first. If you have 20 users, you only need two more this week to grow 10%. And while two users is a small number for most products, 10% a week is a great growth rate. If you keep growing at 10% a week, the absolute numbers will eventually become impressive."
Doesn't the 10% growth (but actually just 2 more users) thing sound like vanity metrics? I don't see how 2 more users is that great by making it seem bigger?
Better than nothing, better than non-paying users maybe but it reminds me of a Publishing company i used to work for who once internally touted their 100% rise in video revenue (ignoring the fact they had 5 or 6 times the amount of products released at the beginning of that month and had no video product with a projected profitable lifecycle).
Covering user acquisition in unneeded and transparent vanity metrics seems to me to be unnecessary, especially when you are asking customers for brutal reality.