If you’re raising capital or just trying to figure out whether your SaaS business is heading in the right direction, the question of what to measure comes up fast. And at the pre-seed to seed stage, it can feel like everyone has a different answer.
The truth is simpler than it looks. At this stage, your job isn’t to have polished dashboards or hit ambitious growth targets. It’s to prove that you’re building something people actually want – and that you’re paying attention to the right signals.
If you want help getting your metrics and reporting set up from the start, book a call with the Standard Ledger team.
Where Pre-Seed to Seed Fits in the Bigger Picture
SaaS metrics don’t exist in isolation – they shift as your business matures. The table below maps the key metric categories across each growth stage, so you can see where pre-seed to seed fits before we go deeper on the specifics.
| Stage | First Customers (Pre-Seed to Seed) | Early Growth | Growth / Scale | Expand |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Focus area | Traction | Retention | Efficiency | Business |
| Metric 1 | New logos / bookings | Logo retention | Gross margin | Rule of 40 |
| Metric 2 | Burn rate / runway | Dollar retention | Burn multiple | Magic number |
| Metric 3 | MRR / ARR | ARR growth | ARR / employee | Utilisation |
| Metric 4 | Churn | Lifetime value | Pipeline metrics | R&D / S&M / G&A as % of revenue |
| Metric 5 | Customer acquisition cost | CAC payback | Customer acquisition cost | EBITDA |
At pre-seed to seed, the focus is traction – proving that customers exist, that they’re paying, and that you’re managing your cash carefully enough to keep going.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
New Logos and Bookings
Your earliest customers are a milestone worth tracking carefully. The number of new logos – that is, new customers – and the dollar value of their contracts matters less for its raw size than for what it signals: that someone out there finds value in what you’re building.
Investors who care about early-stage SaaS want to see this. So start tracking it from day one.
How to calculate:
- Number of new customers signed during the month
- Dollar value of new customers signed during the month
A note on terminology: in the US market, you’ll often hear “bookings” instead of new logos. Bookings refer to the contract value sold – for annual contracts (whether billed annually or monthly), that’s the annual contract value. As you scale into multi-year deals, bookings would reflect the full contract value, and Annual Contract Value (ACV) might represent an average across years.
Burn Rate and Runway
This one isn’t optional. Knowing exactly how much cash you’re spending each month – and how long you can keep operating before it runs out – is a survival metric at this stage.
Keeping burn rate and runway front of mind helps you make better decisions and extend your operating window. That often makes the difference between building something and running out of time before you can.
How to calculate:
- Gross burn rate = total cash operating expenses for the month
- Net burn rate = total cash operating expenses minus receipts for the month
- Runway (months) = cash at bank divided by burn rate (either gross or net)
If you’re less confident in your ability to close new sales consistently, lean on gross burn rather than net. And while runway technically measures how long until cash hits zero, you may also want to track runway to a minimum acceptable cash point based on your own risk tolerance – factoring in wind-up costs if needed.
MRR and ARR
Even a small amount of recurring revenue is a strong signal. It tells investors that users aren’t just interested – they’re willing to pay repeatedly. At this stage, it’s not about scale. It’s about traction and repeatability.
If you’re pre-revenue, that’s okay. But if you’re generating even a few hundred dollars a month in recurring revenue, that matters.
How to calculate:
MRR normalises recurring revenue across different billing cycles:
- Annual billing: MRR = amount billed divided by 12
- Quarterly billing: MRR = amount billed divided by 3
- Monthly billing: MRR = amount billed, and ARR = MRR multiplied by 12
One thing to get right early: revenue recognition. This is the accounting process of converting billings into revenue in your books, typically done at the end of each month. If you recognise revenue equally across all months, the figure on your profit and loss statement matches your MRR. It’s common for early-stage SaaS companies to recognise 100% of billings as revenue – but it’s not technically correct, and investors will ask about it. Starting this properly in a spreadsheet is fine for now, but you’ll want dedicated tools as you scale. For more on building out your financial reporting at this stage, see our guide on what metrics matter at different stages of your growth journey.
Churn
Are users staying? Or disappearing after a few weeks? High churn in the early days is a feedback loop telling you something’s off – whether that’s your product, your onboarding, your messaging, or how you’re delivering value.
Don’t treat churn as just a number. It’s a compass. Use it to iterate quickly.
How to calculate:
- Customer churn % = number of customers lost in the month divided by last month’s closing customer count
- Dollar churn % = MRR lost in the month divided by last month’s closing MRR
Start tracking why customers are churning. Investors will ask this question during due diligence – common reasons include product-market fit, pricing, and service quality. Having that data ready shows you’re paying attention.
Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC)
At this stage, you want CAC to be as low as possible. This isn’t the time for big ad budgets or complicated funnels – it’s the time for resourceful, direct customer acquisition. If you can show early customer growth with minimal spend, that sends a strong signal that your product has genuine pull.
How to calculate:
- CAC = total sales and marketing expenses for new customers divided by the number of new customers acquired in the month
Include all direct costs – wages, CRM subscriptions – and load them fully (super, rent, and similar). Early on, your CAC will be high because you’re doing things that don’t scale while you figure out why customers buy. That’s expected. What investors want to see is that you’re watching it – and that it’s trending down over time. A useful check: reverse-engineer your target CAC from the capital you’re raising and the number of customers you’re planning to acquire.
Be explicit about what you include in your sales and marketing expenses. Investors appreciate clarity here, and consistency makes comparisons easier over time.
Start Measuring What Matters
At this stage, showing that you’re paying attention to metrics is more important than having perfect ones. Your numbers won’t be clean to start – and that’s fine. What matters is that your data collection is intentional, your tracking is consistent, and the groundwork you lay now supports smarter decisions and future funding rounds.
Clean, usable data doesn’t have to be perfect. It does have to be deliberate.
Ready to get your metrics and reporting set up properly? The Standard Ledger team works with early-stage SaaS founders across Australia to build the financial foundations that hold up under investor scrutiny. Get in touch to book a call.
