What numbers should founders actually track?

Most founder dashboards we see have 20 to 30 metrics on them. In practice, five or six numbers, tracked consistently, tell you almost everything you need to know to run the business week to week.

Cash and runway come first. How much cash do you have, and at your current burn rate, how many months does that buy you? Everything else is downstream of this number staying healthy.

Revenue and gross margin come next, not just revenue growth, but what it costs to deliver what you sell. A business growing fast on thin margins is a different business than one growing fast with healthy margins.

Customer economics: what does it cost to acquire a customer, and what is that customer worth over their lifetime. If you don't know these two numbers with reasonable confidence, you don't yet know if your growth is profitable.

Retention: are customers staying, and is usage or spend growing or shrinking over time. Growth that comes with a leaky bucket is much more fragile than growth that compounds.

Everything beyond these becomes useful at specific moments, but these five give you an honest, current read on the business without needing a 40-tab spreadsheet to get there.

Who wrote this

Shafneed is the founder of Simplify, a finance clarity and investment readiness practice working with founders across India. He writes about the questions founders bring before a decision, not after it.