The aim of a business is to grow and the way to do you need to gain more customers. The easiest way to do this is to use money to promote your product, but not all growth is good growth, especially where the Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) is more than the revenue from the new customer.
Computers have got cheaper since the early days and the internet has caused software to evolve into Software as a Service (SaaS) in the early 2000's
Not all customers are equal and the best customer have a high customer lifetime value (LTV). Being able to calculate your LTV helps you to ensure your business model is sustainable.
The customer is king, but how do you know when you have a customer? It is when they sign up? When they start a trial? or when they start using the product? what about freemium users? Are user the same as customers?
SaaS provides a huge range of applications at a low cost but it needs to ensure that the customer does not churn before the on-boarding costs are recouped.
Metrics only matter if they can help you improve your performance. Everything else is just vanity metrics.
