A school using FutureFund — my fundraising platform for K-12 school groups — recently raised $9500 for their softball team during a hit-a-thon campaign. That money will have a positive impact on those students, but it's not the kind of thing we'd use to advertise the value of our platform.

Without context, that $9500 doesn't provide any useful information to potential users. It might feel loosely positive, but it says nothing about what they could expect from using the platform. In other words, it's a vanity metric.

Here's a better way to look at the data: $9500 raised by a team of 30 students breaks down to about $353 per student. Imagine a school group trying to raise money for a football team of 50 players — or a fun run with hundreds of participants. That per-student metric would mean much more to them than some arbitrary lump sum.

Startups often make this mistake. They focus on numbers that don't really matter while ignoring the ones that do.

Here's how you can fix that.

Related: We're Great at Wishing and Bad at Making Choices — How Obscure Goals and Narrow Targets Derail Our Success

The biggest vanity metric most startups chase is........

© Entrepreneur