In the early 2000s, I was running an ecommerce business when most websites were measured by one metric: eyeballs.<\/p>\n
How many people visited your site? That was the scoreboard. Revenue and profit got far less attention.<\/p>\n
I got caught up in it too. The traffic was real. The business I expected it to become never materialised.<\/p>\n
Twenty years later, building Dukanline, I nearly made the same mistake.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
It sounded impressive. But footfall across our store network didn\u2019t tell me how many people wanted to buy through us.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
This week, while scrolling through my LinkedIn feed, I came across a founder\u2019s post that brought it all back.<\/p>\n
His content had reached 200,000 people in one week. His pipeline that same week: zero new leads. Zero calls booked.<\/p>\n
Some of that attention may turn into business later. But the reach alone doesn\u2019t tell us whether it will.<\/p>\n
Eyeballs. Footfall. Impressions. Reach.<\/p>\n
The names change. The temptation to mistake attention for demand stays the same.<\/p>\n
I know because even after learning that lesson once, I nearly did it again.<\/p>\n
Attention matters. It gives us a chance to win a customer. We still have to earn the sale and make the economics work.<\/p>\n
So alongside the reach numbers, I want to see one more line:<\/p>\n
How many customers paid us this week and did we make money serving them?<\/p>\n
Krishna Lakamsani | Serial Entrepreneur | Investor | I write at the intersection of AI, capital, and the future of the human job market,\u2028sharing my life lessons, reflections, and honest takes from the founder-investor’s seat.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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