How Do We Measure Success?
Last week I attended Founders Live in Bellevue to network and get a better sense of what other early-stage companies in the community are building. Events like this are always a good pulse check: you hear what people are excited about, you swap tools and ideas, and you remember that building in community accelerates everything.
And immediately, the benefits of showing up were already paying off.
I ended up in a conversation with another founder I met there—Lingan Satkunanathan—whose experience and intrinsic curiosity pushed me to notice how important it is to stay grounded in our philosophy, even in environments where groupthink and startup short-hand are the default. We were talking about Hypandra, and he asked a deceptively straightforward question:
"How do you measure success?"
Without even thinking, I defaulted to revenue numbers and scaling strategies. That's the reflex most of us have in the startup world; it's how success gets benchmarked and compared.
But Lingan didn't let me stay there.
He asked:
"Money aside—what tells you your mission is succeeding? Would 10,000 paying users mean success? Or is it 100 million people using AI properly?"
This brought me back to a clearer articulation of something we have talked about internally since day one. Because measuring success is complicated. There's:
- the success of the mission,
- the success of the company,
- and the success of the product—
and revenue only speaks directly to one of those three.
Lingan was right to push me.
Revenue has its place. It reveals signals about behavior, demand, and sustainability. But mission success lives in a completely different domain—and it can be entirely agnostic to money.
For Hypandra, mission success has always centered on strengthening human curiosity. In Daniel's intro blog he wrote that "Hypandra exists to protect and promote curiosity." Why? So what? We are on a mission to help people think more deeply and intentionally, to wonder and dream, and demand more. We are doing this work so people can notice that itch in the back of their mind and not just scratch it, but cherish it and explore it. Daniel and I talk about how curiosity is not just a trait or state but a skill. Success for us is knowing that we've helped people build that skill and have found ways to put it to meaningful use in their lives and work.
This conversation reminded me of the voice message I left for myself after first talking with Daniel about Hypandra back in August. It reminded me of why I left my job to join him. If we can help shift culture toward valuing those frictions—the little itches, inklings of doubts, sparks of wonder, a touch of humility—then we're succeeding on the mission level.
But how do we measure that success? How do we measure curiosity? How do we measure meaningful applications of curiosity in our lives? How do we measure the value of the friction? It will not be perfect and we must always ask what we are missing but we have some idea. We have been measuring the curiosity of questions and are working on refining that. We will be measuring how the curiosity of someone's questions in our Are You Curiouser? game improves through use and Hypandra's feedback. We will start sharing more about the research on the benefits to curiosity and where Hypandra fits in.
We're also building the intentional pause that keeps humans in the loop, that keeps automation bias from letting us say Google told me so or ChatGPT said…. We're focused on helping you take a moment to frame your thinking, sharpen your creativity, and set the tone before turning to the machines. It's the safeguard against idea hijacking, premature deference, or the flattening effect that comes from instant answers.
My conversation with Lingan helped me sit with and reflect on our mission and pushed Daniel and I to talk more—and ask each other more questions—about how we might measure success.