If You Don’t Measure It, You Can’t Monetize It

Why tracking the right metrics at $1,000 MRR is more important than adding new features, and how observability shapes the survival curve of your product

Founders at the $1,000 monthly recurring revenue stage often mistake motion for progress. Features get shipped, marketing experiments are run, dashboards are refreshed obsessively. But ask one simple question — “How many users actually finish onboarding?” — and the silence is deafening.

Instrumentation, the act of embedding measurement into your product, isn’t glamorous. It doesn’t flash on a landing page or make for a shiny investor pitch. Yet, without it, every decision is a guess. And guessing at $1,000 MRR is like driving a race car blindfolded — you may not crash immediately, but the odds aren’t in your favor.

The truth is brutal: the companies that treat metrics as first-class citizens are the ones that grow. Those that don’t? They’re left with anecdotal theories and the creeping churn that follows unexamined friction.

Instrumentation as a Superpower

Imagine you want to know why customers are abandoning checkout. Without instrumentation, all you see is the end result: unpaid invoices. With instrumentation, you see exactly where they drop off — adding items to a cart but not entering payment details, or filling in…