For years, product-market fit was treated like a gut feeling. “You’ll know it when you have it,” they said. And to be fair, when you do have it, you really do know. The symptoms are hard to miss: customers are pulling the product out of your hands, sales is overwhelmed, support can’t keep up, and suddenly, your biggest problems are growth and scale. Demand exceeds supply. It’s real, and it’s clear.

But that clarity often arrives late. In most companies, it takes years to reach that point. And if you wait until the signs are obvious, you might have already wasted time going in the wrong direction. That’s why it’s critical to measure your way toward product-market fit, even when you’re still far from it. You want to know if you’re on the right track. If your fundamentals are working. If your bets are starting to pay off.

That’s where Dave McClure’s Pirate Metrics for Startups framework becomes incredibly useful. It breaks the customer journey into five distinct categories: acquisition, activation, retention, referral, and revenue. That’s also where the name comes from: the acronym these categories create is AARRR, which sounds like a pirate’s growl.

Originally developed with B2C startups in mind, it’s often dismissed by B2B teams as too simplistic or irrelevant. But that’s a mistake.

I’ve been using this framework to evaluate and guide B2B products for nearly a decade. With the right adjustments, it gives you exactly the structure you need to measure progress in complex sales environments, where the signals are slower and harder to interpret. It helps you see where the friction is and whether the product is starting to land.

In this article, I’ll show how to apply the Pirate Metrics framework in B2B. What to look for at each stage, how to adapt it to long cycles and multiple personas, and why retention and revenue are still your best indicators of fit – even in enterprise sales.

Signals Can Come In Small Numbers

One of the most common objections I hear from B2B companies when we start talking about measuring product-market fit is, “But we don’t have the data.” I’ve heard this from early-stage startups, post-Series A companies, and even mature enterprise players with complex sales cycles. And I get it. When your numbers are small, the idea of measuring anything can feel premature or even pointless.

But that’s a misconception.

You don’t need dashboards full of metrics to understand whether something’s working. You need to pay attention.

If you’ve spoken to 10 potential customers and none of them are willing to start a pilot, that’s not a data problem. That’s your answer. If two were excited, moved quickly, and brought their CTO to the second meeting, that’s a signal too. The numbers may be small, but the meaning is clear. In B2B, the signals don’t show up in volume. They show up in behavior.

The problem is that we’ve trained ourselves to equate measurement with statistical significance. We wait for bigger numbers to feel more confident. But if customers want what you’re building badly enough, they’ll show you, even in small batches, and that’s what you should build your confidence on.

Don’t let the term ‘metrics’ confuse you. It’s about signals and not about dashboards.

Look at the few deals you are working on. Are they moving forward? Are they getting stuck? What’s driving them? What’s blocking them? You’ll find the answers there.

It Takes What It Takes

Another challenge B2B teams often raise when trying to apply Pirate Metrics is the timeline. In B2C, these stages are fast and clean. Acquisition means someone clicked an ad and downloaded your app. Activation might happen within minutes. But in B2B, these same stages can stretch over weeks – or even months. And that makes people uncomfortable. If acquisition takes four meetings and a legal review, does it still count? Absolutely.

The framework doesn’t break just because your process is longer. It only reflects the reality of your customers. Your customer has their own pace and decision-making journey to go through. The framework still works. You just need to anchor it to what real progress looks like in your world.

Remember that Pirate Metrics isn’t about speed. It’s about identifying the key points in your customer journey and making sure they’re happening. If your acquisition phase takes three weeks, that doesn’t make it any less valid. If activation takes six months, that doesn’t mean you can’t measure it. Phases can take time. What matters is that the journey moves forward.

So don’t worry about how long each step takes. It takes what it takes. The important part is to define what each stage means for your product and your customer, and then track how consistently you’re seeing it happen. Because once you do, you’ll have a clear view of whether product-market fit is getting closer or drifting further away.

What Specific Metrics Look Like

Let’s go over the various stages one by one.

Acquisition

Acquisition means a potential customer has heard about you and wants to learn more. In B2C, that might look like clicking an ad or downloading an app, although even there it usually takes a few impressions before they act. In B2B, the path is longer and more layered. They might attend a conference talk, read something you published, respond to a cold email to start with, but then they need to ask or agree to a meeting, see a demo, bring in their colleagues to another meeting, and sometimes even review your pricing before deciding to move forward. That’s perfectly fine. It takes what it takes.

Activation

Activation means the first time a customer truly experiences value from your product. In B2C, this might be immediate – the moment someone uses the app and it clicks. But in B2B, value often shows up during a POC or POV, and even that’s not always in a live environment. Sometimes it’s enough for them to see the potential. They realize it’s worth the effort to move forward to purchase, even if full integration is still ahead. This phase could take months to complete, and is broken down into multiple more specific steps.

Retention

The retention part of the framework doesn’t mean contract renewal or dollar retention. It means product usage retention, which is essentially the ongoing signal that the customer is consistently seeing value in your product. In B2B, this can be harder to measure than in B2C because enterprise products aren’t always used daily, and in many cases, usage volume isn’t even the strongest indicator of value.

Think about cybersecurity or infrastructure products that run in the background. If everything works well, the users might never login to a management screen, or at least not too frequently. In these cases, seek to measure the essence – the value they see from your product – and not usage retention per se. 

Think beyond the product. What behaviors and outcomes indicate that your product is not only in use, but is still valuable to them? For example, if the risks your cybersecurity product identifies are being fixed, that means something. If they open the monthly reports like a clock, that could be an indication.

Stick to the essence and think beyond what’s easily measurable to understand what your value really looks like in the customer’s life.

Revenue

Revenue might seem like the most straightforward stage and easy to measure, but in B2B it often raises questions, mainly because the first payment comes before retention or even before activation. That’s fine. You can add an earlier “initial deal” stage if it helps. But the real signal you’re looking for here is recurring revenue. Whether it’s a monthly SaaS subscription or a three-year enterprise renewal, recurrence is what makes a product sustainable. One-time deals don’t mean product-market fit and are actually a bad signal. A customer who pays again because they still see the value is the signal that your product is delivering on its promise.

Referral

Referral in B2B looks very different from consumer-style referral codes or affiliate links. It’s more structured and often more meaningful. The strongest signal is a public reference – when a customer agrees to publish a case study, speak at your event, or allow their logo on your site (although that’s a weaker signal than the previous two). But not all products allow for that. In sensitive domains, customers may prefer to stay anonymous. That’s fine. The baseline you’re looking for is reference willingness. When asked, do they agree to take a call? Do they do it happily? Do they speak positively about your product to others in their network? If the answer is yes to all of them, that’s a strong referral signal.

The Pirate Metrics for Startups framework is an extremely powerful tool for measuring your way to product-market fit. Don’t be alarmed by the B2C-like wording, and stick to the essence of each phase to translate it into your B2B product domain.