Waitlists are a Vanity Metric
They measure the size of your pride, not the size of your business
Waitlists, registered users, and other cumulative measures are vanity metrics.
By vanity — I mean they better measure the size of your pride than the size of your business.
First-year MBA operations courses emphasize that long lines should be avoided and certainly not optimized for.
Unless you are in fact a vanity or “prestige” product, bragging about these metrics destroys your credibility in the eyes of potential investors.
Most importantly, in paying them too much attention, you fool, distract, and mislead your most gullible stakeholder — yourself.
The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool — Richard Feynman
Be kind to your potential customers, your investors, and yourself — ignore these misleading numbers.
Cumulative metrics are problematic for many reasons. The main two are:
- They almost never decrease — by design
- They have zero intrinsic correlation to customer value
