Few things are as pure as a transaction.

It’s the aggregate of factors affecting customer choice.

Where marketing, sales, customer want, brand value and UX mash together.

Where belief and timing intersect. Where trust meets the swipe of a credit card. Where a decision—a vote of commitment–is made.

Marketing generates scads of data. It’s inspired the science of analytics and measurement. We measure reach, build conjectures around engagement and social touch points. We even attempt to measure brand, the purest connection of belief to a market.

This data is really useful and essential to our job. It’s a tool of the trade but all of it is conjecture around behavior. None of it is not as revealing as what we learn from customers during the sales process.

In startups where you are in the business of selling things, putting a price on value, revenue is more a marketing data point than proof of a model. Especially early on.

More an indication of product market fit than anything else.

It is the truest KPI.

Think about your first $1M in revenue.

When you cross it. When you seriously  believe that you are on the run rate towards it, it is pure magic. Emotive and primal and a damn epiphany.

It’s also a reality check and bellwether for investors. A gateway to a host of fundraising opportunities.

It’s certainly time to take the team to the bar.

Truth be told though, revenue, especially that first couple of million, has little to do with your future business model. Almost nothing to do with how efficient your model is today.

I’ll take the bet that 90% of the time how you are making money at the $1M mark will look completely different than at $20M, even $10M. The value you are selling at 20x today’s revenue may be the same but how you are delivering it won’t be.

Today you are muscling things into place. Creating consulting services before productizing the value.

You are touching flesh with each and every one who shows interest to find a connection. It’s romance that feels more solid than a fling.

It couldn’t however be more important, more indicative and more valuable.

What early revenue does is give you a glimpse of what your market could possibly look like.

You get the chance to see, maybe for the first time, what your brand looks like to the only individuals that matter, the customer and the superset of them, the market.

Marketers dream of visceral touch points with the market.

The best go out into the world and sell products to understand their customer behaviors at the point of sale. Online we fuss and obsess about every piece of data that implies a connection, a dynamic, or an understanding. But we are always one step removed from reality.

We desperately want to know what the customer thinks and are invariably stymied in that understanding.

The art of business is about creating an environment where sales is a natural process and where it is comfortable for a customer to discover and choose you.

How you do that is what defines success.

Marketing as a discipline builds the touch points and creates the environment for that to happen. Sales manages the timing of that choice, the understanding of how the thing you sell plays into the urgency of the customer to buy.

Revenue early on for startups is where this comes together.

I’ve been at that first $1M revenue mark a bunch of times.

Every time it happens it’s a wonder and invariably I can tell who bought what, when, how they felt about the purchase and where they found us.

This is information to die for.

This is the data to understand the connection between what you are selling and what the customer thinks they are buying. From that data you start to figure out how to scale what you have. How to price, deliver, expand the line and support it.

At my core I’m a brand builder who simply loves numbers, sales data especially.

I love them later on when they are the scorecard for company health and wealth. I love them early as they show you how to get there.

Building a business is all about making decisions.

Often from the gut, invariably through presupposition. Too frequently in the dark.

There is nothing like a transaction, like sales exposure, to make your assumptions and your decisions more concrete and more valuable.

That’s the real definition of a KPI.