Track your user journey through Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Referral, and Revenue to identify which stage constrains growth most.
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Pirate Metrics is a practical framework that slices the customer journey into five clear checkpoints: acquisition, activation, retention, referral and revenue. By measuring each stage separately you can see exactly where prospects leak out, then design focused experiments to plug the gaps.
By logging these numbers weekly you spot bottlenecks fast: perhaps activation lags in the SaaS trial, or retention dips in the fitness app. Fix one stage at a time, stack 10% lifts and results compound across the funnel.
Pirate Metrics matter because they reveal the difference between symptom and cause in growth problems. Revenue might be flat, tempting you to increase acquisition spending, but AARRR analysis might show that Retention is collapsing you're acquiring users fine but losing them before they pay, meaning more acquisition just pours water into a leaky bucket. The framework systematically prevents this waste by ensuring you identify and fix the actual constraint. For product-led growth businesses especially, AARRR provides the diagnostic structure: if Activation is weak (users sign up but never experience value), no amount of Acquisition improvement will help, and Retention is impossible when users never activate. The sequential nature also highlights that optimising later stages amplifies earlier efforts: improving Retention from 30% to 40% means every acquisition pound now generates 33% more lifetime value, instantly making all acquisition channels more profitable. The framework also surfaces natural optimisation priority: if you convert 50% at each stage, improving the earliest weak stage helps all subsequent stages benefit, whilst improving the final stage helps only that stage. Referral particularly deserves focus because it's the only stage that compounds successful referral mechanisms reduce acquisition costs toward zero whilst accelerating growth. Organisations implementing AARRR frameworks typically discover they've been optimising the wrong stage: acquisition teams might be hitting targets whilst activation is terrible, or retention might be excellent whilst acquisition receives all attention and investment. The framework also creates shared language across product, marketing, and growth functions, enabling evidence-based prioritisation discussions rather than political debates about which team's agenda matters most.
The cockpit that sits above your four growth engines. Individual teams can excel at their own metrics, but without orchestration they're musicians playing different songs. This is where everything comes together and where improvements in one engine amplify gains in another.
The wrong tools create friction. The right ones multiply your output without adding complexity. These are the tools I recommend for growth teams that move fast.
Small improvements multiply. A 10% gain across twelve metrics doesn't add up to 120% - it compounds to 3x growth. This is the mathematical engine behind systematic growth.
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Four decisions that shape everything else. When growth feels harder than it should, the problem is usually here. Get these right and execution becomes much easier.
Without rhythm, effort becomes scattered and progress invisible. A consistent operating cadence keeps your team aligned and your growth system continuously improving.
Sean Ellis
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A practical framework for experiments and insights. Build loops, run tests and adopt a cadence that ships learning every week.
Gino Wickman
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A practical operating system for small teams. Install a cadence, set priorities and create accountability that sticks.
Eric Ries
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A disciplined approach to experiments. Define hypotheses, design MVPs and learn before you scale.
Alistair Croll
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Pick the One Metric that Matters for your stage. Build lean dashboards and use data to decide the next best move.
Track what matters for growth decisions. Map key conversions, name events with clear conventions, and document tracking specifications.
Annual goals mean nothing without quarterly targets that break them down. Learn how to work backwards from revenue through conversion steps and set the assumptions your team will execute against. By the end of this chapter, you'll have a model that turns ambition into arithmetic and gives every team a number they own.
Plan how you'll reach customers and generate revenue by choosing channels, pricing, and sales models that match your product and market reality.
Prioritise tasks systematically by sorting them into urgent-important quadrants, focusing effort on high-impact activities.
Credit the channel that introduced prospects to your brand to measure awareness efforts and understand which top-of-funnel activities start customer journeys.
Turn satisfied customers into active promoters who systematically bring qualified prospects into your pipeline at near-zero acquisition cost.
Win customers through direct sales conversations where reps guide prospects from discovery to close with personalised solutions and relationship building.
Attract prospects through valuable content that solves real problems, building trust and generating qualified leads who approach you.
Organise the tools that capture leads, nurture prospects, and measure performance to automate repetitive work and connect customer data across systems.
Identify what you do better or differently that competitors can't easily copy to defend margins and win customers consistently over time.
Send a series of scheduled emails that educate prospects over time to stay top-of-mind without overwhelming them with aggressive sales pitches.
Diagnose and break through stagnation by identifying which business mechanisms have reached capacity and require new approaches.
Set ambitious goals and measurable outcomes that cascade through your organisation, creating alignment and accountability for strategic priorities.
Group customers by acquisition period to compare behaviour patterns and identify which acquisition channels and time periods produce the best long-term value.
Automate multi-touch email campaigns that adapt based on recipient behaviour to nurture leads consistently without manual follow-up from reps or marketers.
Measure which marketing activities drive desired outcomes to allocate budget toward channels that actually generate revenue instead of vanity metrics.
Compare two versions of a page, email, or feature to determine which performs better using statistical methods that isolate the impact of specific changes.
Measure the percentage of customers who stop paying to identify retention problems and calculate the true cost of growth in subscription businesses.
Document your ideal customer's role, goals, and challenges to tailor messaging and prioritise features that solve real problems they actually pay for.
Achieve the state where your product solves a genuine, urgent problem for a defined market that's willing to pay and actively pulling your solution in.
Log emails, calls, and meetings automatically to understand what drives deals forward and coach reps based on actual behaviour rather than guesswork.
Deploy fast, low-cost experiments to discover scalable acquisition and retention tactics, learning through iteration rather than big bets.