In the early 2000s, I was running an ecommerce business when most websites were measured by one metric: eyeballs.

How many people visited your site? That was the scoreboard. Revenue and profit got far less attention.

I got caught up in it too. The traffic was real. The business I expected it to become never materialised.

Twenty years later, building Dukanline, I nearly made the same mistake.

I would tell people that thousands of customers walked into our network of kirana stores every hour, right past our assisted-ecommerce point of sale.

It sounded impressive. But footfall across our store network didn’t tell me how many people wanted to buy through us.

The questions I should have been asking were simpler: How many actually bought? And after discounts and costs, did we make money on those sales?

This week, while scrolling through my LinkedIn feed, I came across a founder’s post that brought it all back.

His content had reached 200,000 people in one week. His pipeline that same week: zero new leads. Zero calls booked.

Some of that attention may turn into business later. But the reach alone doesn’t tell us whether it will.

Eyeballs. Footfall. Impressions. Reach.

The names change. The temptation to mistake attention for demand stays the same.

I know because even after learning that lesson once, I nearly did it again.

Attention matters. It gives us a chance to win a customer. We still have to earn the sale and make the economics work.

So alongside the reach numbers, I want to see one more line:

How many customers paid us this week and did we make money serving them?

Krishna Lakamsani | Serial Entrepreneur | Investor | I write at the intersection of AI, capital, and the future of the human job market,
sharing my life lessons, reflections, and honest takes from the founder-investor's seat.