Founders think a fund raise is won on the pitch. It isn’t. The pitch gets you the meeting. The numbers get you the money.
The moment an investor likes your story, they stop listening to you and start interrogating your metrics. And they don’t look at the pretty headline number – they look at the quality of it. A 20% growth month built on heavy discounting and a leaky bucket is worth less than a 10% month with negative churn. They know the difference. The question is whether you do.
Here are the nine metrics they go to first, what each one actually tells them, and the benchmark that separates “interesting” from “pass.”
1. MRR and ARR – the headline
Monthly Recurring Revenue and its annualized cousin (ARR = MRR × 12) are the starting line. Everyone reports them. That’s exactly why they prove nothing on their own.
A clean MRR number is table stakes. What an investor wants to know is how you got there – which brings us to the metric most decks skip.
2. MRR movement – where growth actually comes from
This is the one that separates operators from spectators. Break your MRR change into five components every month:
- New – revenue from new customers
- Expansion – existing customers paying you more
- Reactivation – win-backs
- Churned – customers who left
- Contraction – downgrades
Two companies can post identical net growth. One is acquiring efficiently with customers who expand. The other is pouring new sales into a bucket that’s leaking out the bottom. The net number hides it. The movement breakdown exposes it. Investors ask for this because it’s the fastest way to see whether your growth is durable or rented.
3. Logo churn and revenue churn
Logo churn counts customers lost. Revenue churn counts dollars lost. Track both, because they tell different stories – losing ten $50 accounts is not the same as losing one $5,000 account.
Rough monthly benchmarks: SMB SaaS often runs 3–5% logo churn, mid-market 1–2%, enterprise under 1%. If you’re losing more than ~5% of customers every month, no amount of top-of-funnel spend fixes the math. Investors know that, so they check churn before they get excited about growth.
4. Net Revenue Retention – the number that matters most
If you only fix one metric, fix this one. NRR measures how much revenue you keep and grow from existing customers over a year, ignoring new sales entirely.
- Below 100% – you’re shrinking before you sell anything new
- Around 100% – you’re holding the line
- 110%+ – your existing base grows on its own; this is what gets premium valuations
NRR above 100% means expansion outruns churn. It’s the closest thing in SaaS to a cheat code, and it’s the first number a good investor will pull.
5. ARPA – average revenue per account
Average Revenue Per Account (total MRR ÷ active customers) tells you who you’re really selling to and whether that’s drifting. A rising ARPA usually means you’re moving upmarket; a falling one can signal discounting or a shift toward smaller, churn-prone accounts. It’s also the input that makes LTV believable.
6. CAC, LTV, and the LTV:CAC ratio
CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is what you spend in sales and marketing to land one customer. LTV (Lifetime Value) is what that customer is worth before they leave – roughly ARPA × gross margin ÷ churn rate.
The ratio is the verdict:
- 3:1 or better – healthy; you’re building real enterprise value
- 1.5:1 to 3:1 – workable, but tighten it
- Below 1.5:1 – you’re losing money on every customer you acquire, and scaling makes it worse
A founder who can’t state their LTV:CAC from memory tells the investor everything they need to know.
7. CAC payback period
How many months of gross margin it takes to earn back the cost of acquiring a customer. Under 12 months is healthy. Past 18 and you’re burning capital faster than you’re recovering it – which means every “growth” dollar is actually a liability until it pays back. This is the metric that connects your unit economics to your runway.
8. Cohort retention
Group customers by the month they signed up, then track what percentage are still paying 1, 3, 6, and 12 months later. A healthy cohort curve flattens – it stops dropping and holds. A bad one slides toward zero.
Cohorts are where churn stops being an average and starts being a pattern. They answer the question averages can’t: are your newer customers sticking better than your older ones, or worse? Investors read cohort tables like an X-ray. You should too.
9. The Rule of 40
The tidy summary metric: growth rate + profit margin should clear 40%. Grow 30% with a 15% margin and you’re at 45 – strong. Grow 50% while burning 20% and you’re at 30 – the market will ask hard questions. It’s a blunt instrument, most useful past roughly $10M ARR, but it’s the one-line sanity check investors use to decide whether your growth is worth its cost.
The real problem isn’t knowing the metrics. It’s tracking them.
None of these nine numbers is complicated on its own. The pain is keeping all of them current, tied together, and trustworthy – every single month, in one place, without a broken formula quietly feeding you the wrong number the night before a board meeting.
Most founders try to do this in a spreadsheet they built at 1 a.m. It works until it doesn’t: a reference breaks, a month gets mislabeled, churn gets entered as a positive number, and suddenly the dashboard says December but shows January. Now you’re not just missing a metric – you’re presenting a wrong one. To investors. On purpose-looking slides.
That’s the gap I built the SaaS Metrics Dashboard to close. It tracks all nine of these metrics – MRR movement, churn, NRR, ARPA, LTV:CAC, payback, cohort retention and the Rule of 40 – from one set of monthly inputs, with built-in checks that flag a mistake before your investors do. You type your numbers into the yellow cells; it builds the cockpit. Works in Excel and Google Sheets, no add-ons, no macros.
It’s the same model I’d build for a client on a fractional CFO engagement, packaged so you can run it yourself.
Check this Etsy link for the ready made SaaS excel template.
If you’d rather have it done with you – modeling, board prep, the whole finance function on a fractional basis – that’s what Frac CFO does. Reach out at jonas.frac.cfo@gmail.com.
Either way: know your nine numbers before you walk into the room. The founders who get funded are the ones who already did.
– Jonas, Frac CFO · fraccfo.org