whats the metric you obsessed over early on that turned out to be completely wrong?

for me it was signups. i was so focused on getting more people to sign up that i completely ignored what happened after they got in. turns out most of them never came back after day one.

when i finally shifted to tracking activation rate (did they actually use the core feature in the first session) everything changed. fewer vanity numbers but way more actual users who stuck around and eventually paid.

curious what metric you were tracking early that you later realized was either misleading or totally irrelevant. what did you switch to instead