Analytics for your first $100k year

Early-stage analytics should be simple

When you’re building toward your first $100k in annual revenue, you don’t need sophisticated analytics. You need clarity on a few critical metrics that tell you whether your business is working. Complex dashboards and advanced metrics can wait.

Focus on what matters at this stage and ignore the noise.

The metrics that actually matter at $100k

At this stage, a handful of metrics tell you most of what you need to know.

Revenue:

How much are you selling? Track daily, weekly, and monthly. Know your run rate. Simple, but foundational.

Orders:

How many orders are you getting? Order count alongside revenue shows average order value implicitly.

Traffic:

How many people visit your store? You can’t sell if no one shows up. Track visitors to understand your reach.

Conversion rate:

What percentage of visitors buy? This single metric captures how well your site turns interest into sales.

These four metrics—revenue, orders, traffic, conversion—tell you the basic health of your business.

Why simplicity matters early

Complex analytics can actually hurt at this stage.

Analysis paralysis:

Too many metrics leads to confusion about what matters. You end up analyzing instead of improving.

False precision:

With small numbers, metrics are noisy. A 50% conversion rate change might be 2 orders versus 3 orders. Statistical significance doesn’t exist at this scale.

Distraction from fundamentals:

Sophisticated segmentation and attribution analysis can wait. At this stage, you need product-market fit and basic execution, not analytics refinement.

Understanding your unit economics

Even at $100k, you must understand whether orders are profitable.

Basic contribution calculation:

Revenue minus product cost minus shipping minus payment processing. What’s left? If it’s negative, you have a fundamental problem.

Don’t need perfection:

You don’t need exact costs for every SKU. Reasonable estimates work. Know approximately whether you make or lose money on each order.

The critical question:

Can you acquire a customer for less than they’re worth? If CAC exceeds contribution margin and customers don’t repeat, your model doesn’t work.

Customer acquisition cost awareness

Know what you’re paying to acquire customers.

Simple CAC calculation:

Marketing spend divided by new customers acquired. If you spent $1,000 on ads and got 25 new customers, CAC is $40.

Channel-level CAC:

If you use multiple channels, know which are cheaper. Facebook versus Google versus Instagram. Put more money into what works.

Don’t over-optimize yet:

At this scale, finding any working acquisition channel matters more than optimizing it perfectly.

Traffic sources

Understand where your visitors come from.

Basic source breakdown:

Direct, organic search, paid search, social, email, referral. Which sources drive traffic? Which convert best?

Why it matters:

If all your traffic is paid, you’re dependent on ad spend. Organic and referral traffic is more sustainable.

Action orientation:

If a source works, do more of it. If it doesn’t, try something else. Simple decisions based on simple data.

Product performance basics

Know which products sell.

Top sellers:

Which products generate the most revenue? Which have the most orders? Focus attention and marketing on what works.

Non-performers:

Which products don’t sell? At this stage, you might not have enough data to judge. Give products time, but don’t ignore complete failures.

Margin awareness:

Are your best sellers also profitable? Revenue is good; profitable revenue is better.

Repeat purchase tracking

Do customers come back?

Simple repeat rate:

What percentage of customers have ordered more than once? At small scale, you can almost count these manually.

Why it matters early:

If no one comes back, you need to constantly acquire new customers. If people return, your business can grow more sustainably.

Qualitative insight:

At this scale, you can reach out to repeat customers. Ask why they came back. The qualitative insight might be more valuable than the metric.

What to ignore at $100k

Save these for later stages.

Complex attribution:

Multi-touch attribution models don’t matter when you have 50 customers. Focus on what seems to work.

Detailed cohort analysis:

Monthly cohorts of 20 customers don’t provide reliable patterns. You need more data for meaningful cohort analysis.

Sophisticated segmentation:

You don’t have enough customers to segment meaningfully. Treat customers as one group for now.

A/B testing with statistical rigor:

You don’t have traffic volume for statistically significant tests. Make decisions based on judgment and directional data.

Tools at this stage

Keep your tools simple and free or cheap.

Google Analytics:

Free, powerful enough for basic traffic and conversion tracking. Learn it well.

Your e-commerce platform:

Shopify, WooCommerce, or whatever you use has built-in reporting. Use it before adding other tools.

Spreadsheets:

Track financial metrics, CAC, and contribution in spreadsheets. You don’t need expensive software yet.

Weekly review habit

Build a simple analytics habit.

Weekly check-in:

Once a week, review revenue, orders, traffic, conversion. Is the business growing? Are the basics working?

Monthly financial review:

Once a month, calculate contribution margin and CAC. Are you making money? Is acquisition sustainable?

Don’t obsess daily:

Checking metrics constantly doesn’t help. At small scale, daily fluctuations are meaningless noise.

Focus on action, not analysis

At $100k, doing matters more than analyzing.

Iterate quickly:

Try things, see basic results, adjust. Speed of iteration beats depth of analysis.

Talk to customers:

Direct customer feedback often provides more insight than metrics at this scale. Why did they buy? What would make them buy again?

Build the business:

Your goal is to grow to where more sophisticated analytics become useful. Get there first.

Metrics summary for first $100k

Track these and mostly ignore everything else:

Revenue (daily, weekly, monthly). Order count. Traffic and traffic sources. Conversion rate. Basic contribution margin. Customer acquisition cost by channel. Top-selling products. Repeat purchase rate.

Analytics at $100k should take minutes per week, not hours. Keep it simple, focus on fundamentals, and build toward the scale where more sophisticated analysis becomes valuable.