How to tell your growth metrics are vanity metrics

Neighbourlytics was growing four hundred per cent year on year. Clients were repeat buying. They were putting Jess Christiansen-Franks on stage at conferences to talk about it. By every number she was tracking, the business was working.

Then she checked the platform. In a quarter where the business had booked $600,000 in revenue, 1,500 users were meant to be logging in regularly. She found fifty logins in three months.

The metrics that looked like proof weren't proof of anything

Renewals, repeat buying, conference invitations, year-on-year growth - every one of these felt like evidence the product worked. None of them measured whether anyone was actually using it. Clients were buying research reports dressed up as software, and the software itself was close to untouched.

A vanity metric is any number that can't fail

That's the test worth taking from this. Revenue growth can be real and still say nothing about product usage - a client can renew because of the relationship, the report, or the sales conversation, not because the platform itself delivered value. The metric that matters is the one that can actually go wrong: logins, return visits, the behaviour the product is supposed to produce. If a number only ever goes up regardless of whether people are using the thing, it isn't telling you anything.

What changed once she asked the right question

The fix wasn't a new dashboard. It was reading Crossing the Chasm and realising Neighbourlytics had been selling to the wrong part of the market - innovators and early adopters, who'll engage with a product on faith, rather than the mainstream buyers who need to see it work before they trust it. Once the targeting shifted, usage numbers started meaning something, because the people buying now actually needed the product to perform.