Stop Reporting Vanity Metrics, Start Focussing on Truth

Stop reporting vanity metrics, and start reporting what really counts: your key financial metrics and your OKRs.

I’ve noticed a tendency among founders to either report vanity metrics or avoid reporting metrics altogether. An investor update is not a novel; it is a structured, efficient report that communicates the key variables that determine your success. 

The Purpose of Investor Updates

A great investor update communicates the truth objectively. I enjoy reading updates that show all historical numbers over time. For example, if “MRR” and “cash in bank” are reported, they are linked to a sheet that shows those numbers for all months since inception (or at least since tracking began).

Focusing on the truth is incredibly important. Jack Welch once said that those teams who see reality best are the ones who end up winning. The same goes for founders. Those who see reality clearly and aren’t afraid to report it openly and simply are far more likely to build something big. In a world where everyone is twisting stories and lying to themselves, those who look at reality objectively and act accordingly already perform better just by doing that. 

Writing good investor updates is one of the best ways to practice and develop the discipline of focussing on truth and reality. The reasons why people do not focus on the truth are, in my opinion, the following.

Why Founders Struggle to Focus on the Truth

First, founders are typically distorted and demotivated by seeing overnight success stories. It makes them always feel behind. They feel they need to report massive, game-changer-like updates every month. This is not necessary. Consistency is all that counts. Those overnight success stories have been created by hard work and diligent reporting, often after a period of looking for PMF for years, and only from the outside do they look like overnight success stories. Keep these points in mind when writing your updates. 

Secondly, founders are great at dreaming up a vision that is not yet true and somehow making reality obey. Unfortunately, when things are not looking great, founders often also dream up vanity metrics of progress to feel subjectively good about what happened. But reporting random shit doesn’t change reality. 

In my opinion, we as founders need to develop the discipline to look reality in the eyes and focus on clear metrics in the short term and dream up visions and possibilities in the long term. I have noticed that the best founders are incredibly visionary and good at storytelling, but when it comes to execution and metrics, they are ruthless, brutal and objective. They take full responsibility for those metrics and constantly think about better and smarter ways to improve them. Reading their updates provides not only a clear and easy-to-follow view of their progress over time but also insight into their pursuit of truth. This includes their efforts to identify the function that best drives key metrics, and to focus themselves and others on the input variables that influence this function.

The Worst Mistakes When Giving Investor Updates 

Complexity is easy, but simplicity is hard. The best businesses are incredibly simple in how they earn money and scale, but mostly because great founders find simplicity amidst seeming chaos, rather than this simplicity having been obvious from the get-go. For you to avoid being overly complex in your updates, here are the worst things that founders do when reporting:

• Changing the style and structure of the update every month
• Changing the type of metrics they report in every single update; reporting whatever looks good
• Sending updates inconsistently
• Sending updates with mistakes, copy & paste errors, etc.
• Reporting vanity metrics
• Writing awfully long texts with explanations (keep in mind investors can always ask for more information)
• Not responding when investors reply to asks
• Sending PDFs or word documents rather than just a simple email

The Key Metrics You Need

Keep in mind that the average investor has invested in more than 30 startups. They have seen a lot, and they know what good updates look like. All they want to see is progress on those metrics that truly matter. If you don’t report those metrics, it’s not like you can deceive those investors in any way. Some key metrics are (almost) universal, such as:

• MRR
• Projected burn rate
• Cash in bank
• Projected runway

Every investor update, even if you are pre-PMF, should include these metrics. If you are pre-PMF, I recommend you report these 4 metrics, alongside an ask (i.e. what do you need help with?), and a short comment on how you got closer or further away from PMF this month. That’s it. One page is more than enough. You should spend most of your time on finding Product-Market-Fit and thinking about where you need support on this quest, rather than reporting numbers.

If you are post-PMF, you can also report the bottom line and include OKRs, which are typically a numerical framework that helps you create more revenue. They break revenue down into OKRs, and it could look something like this:

• Objective 1: 3/20 (goal: Onboard 20 new customers until end of year, each paying more than €1K MRR)
  
  • Top of Funnel: 200/280 (goal: 280 Qualified Leads )
  • Mid-Funnel: 20/200 (goal: 200 Sales Calls Conducted (scheduled Zoom Calls)) 
  • Conversion (call to paying customer): 15%/10% (goal: 10%)
• Objective 2: Increase product quality to reduce churn
  
  • Features that receive NPS > 70%: 0/5
  • Monthly churn: 15%/8%

Keep in mind that OKRs should not change. Of course, the first 3–6 times after finding PMF, you will experiment with different OKRs, and those metrics will change accordingly. However, over time they should become relatively stable.

Moreover, the text in Key Results should stay the same every month. Only the numerical value that follows the text should change. If those key results do not stay consistent, you are likely reporting a “project”, but not an OKR. 

Final Thoughts: Truth Over Vanity

Investor updates aren’t about making things look good—they’re about reporting reality. The best founders don’t hide behind vanity metrics; they track the numbers that truly matter and use them to drive better decisions. Consistency, clarity, and objectivity build trust with investors and, more importantly, help you stay focused on what actually moves the needle. Keep it simple, keep it honest, and let the truth guide your growth.