Start collect user data for future analysis. Measurements should be automatic or you should be possible to get the metrics with a database query. You will need those metrics later.

New registered users per month. Active users per month.

Setup basic web analytics. Web analytics help in user data gathering. Start focusing on improving your product, not getting more users. More about this in web analytics notes.

Find proxy metrics that prove that your product is on the road to being a success. Proxy metrics can be hard to find, especially if you have no data to explore.

If a new Facebook user adds 7 friends in 10 days, they will be a long term user.

The more minutes a customer spends diggint their data in Looker during trial, the more likely that they will be converted to a paid customer.

Find proxy metric to measure active users. Logins are meaningless if user doesn't interact with the product.

How many users have made x searches in past week? How many visitors checked the site 9 times past month? How many users made at least one purchase in 90 days. How many users have used the product at least 30 minutes?

Early activity metric for Twitter was: "How many users have visited at least 7 times past month?" which signaled that the user will continue using Twitter for months to come.

Use separate proxy metric for different user segments.

Qualified lead velocity rate per month is excellent metric. It is even more important than revenue growth for SaaS businesses. If you offer even slightly working product to those leads and you get 10% leads every month, you will hit your revenue goals. QLVR is good because it shouldn't vary from month to month, while some deals might not get made or revenue might reduce if one of our customers goes out of business.

Sources

• The Growth Handbook, Intercom