Founder Metrics

ACV Growth Rate measures the percentage change in Average Contract Value over a specified period, serving as a critical indicator of your company's ability to extract increasing value from customer relationships. This metric reveals whether you're successfully moving upmarket, improving your value proposition, or effectively implementing pricing strategies. Unlike simple revenue growth, ACV Growth Rate isolates the per-customer value expansion, making it essential for understanding unit economics improvements and market positioning evolution.

The percentage of eligible users actively using an AI tool or feature within a given period (daily, weekly, or monthly). Measures whether AI investment is reaching real workflows — license counts and deployments alone don't.

The percentage of AI outputs that pass human review on the first attempt, without rework. Distinct from acceptance rate: this measures quality at the review gate, and determines whether scaling an AI workflow spreads value or spreads rework.

AI Response Acceptance Rate is the percentage of AI-generated outputs, including answers, drafts, code, and recommendations, that users accept without editing or rejection. It measures whether AI assistance produces work people actually use. Its inverse is the Manual Override Rate.

ARR as a Percentage of Total Revenue measures the share of total revenue made up of Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), showing how much of your income is subscription-based versus one-time or non-recurring.

ARR Growth Rate is the change in annual recurring revenue over a given period, typically represented in a percentage. Steadily increasing ARR growth rate year over year is usually indicative of product-market fit.

The ARR Multiple in SaaS calculates the ratio between a company’s valuation and its Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). This metric can be used to estimate the approximate value of a private SaaS company.

Average Purchase Frequency is the average number of times a customer makes a purchase within a defined period. It measures how often customers return to buy, helping businesses understand purchase patterns, inform loyalty strategy, and improve customer lifetime value.

Bessemer Efficiency Score is a measure of capital efficiency that tracks net new ARR against net burn for a given period. This metric showcases the incremental ARR dollars added for every dollar of burn, effectively measuring a company’s spending habits.

Blended CAC Ratio is the total sales and marketing spend required to acquire both new and expansion annual recurring revenue (ARR) in the same period. Unlike narrower CAC measures that focus only on new customer acquisition, Blended CAC Ratio accounts for all sales and marketing costs tied to both new customers and expansion revenue from existing ones. This gives SaaS companies a complete picture of what it costs to grow revenue, not just land it.

Bookings is a key sales metric that is calculated by taking the total dollar value, including subscription, implementation, and discounts, that a customer has committed to spend for a product or service within a specified period.

Burn Multiple is a capital efficiency metric that measures how many dollars a startup burns (spends) to generate each dollar of net new Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR). Calculated as Net Burn divided by Net New ARR, this metric evaluates the cost-effectiveness of revenue growth. A higher Burn Multiple indicates the company is spending more capital per dollar of growth, while a lower Burn Multiple indicates more efficient, capital-efficient growth.