What investors actually read in your product metrics
Wei Chen has read hundreds of board decks. He explains which product numbers change an investor's mind, which get ignored, and why retention curves come before revenue.
- Thursday 10 June
- Day 2
- 14:30–15:10
- 40 minutes
- Main Stage
- Ground floor, hall A
- Talk
- Intermediate
Founders spend weeks polishing the metrics slide. Investors spend about forty seconds on it, and they are usually looking for something other than the headline. Wei Chen has sat on both sides of the table: eight years running a software company through two downturns, then six years investing in early-stage software companies across Asia and Europe.
In this talk he opens up the way he reads product metrics: why a flat retention curve at month six matters more than a steep revenue line, which signs of real usage are hard to fake, and the numbers that make him nervous even when they are going up. He uses anonymised examples from real board decks, including two companies with almost identical revenue and very different futures.
It is useful whether you are raising money, reporting to a board or simply trying to tell whether your own product is working.
What you will take away
- The product metrics investors weigh most, and the ones they discount
- How to read a retention curve, and what a healthy one looks like at each stage
- How to present bad numbers honestly without losing the room
