“The way I think of benchmarks is they're one tool and a very big toolkit of things that Founders CEOs Indie developers product and marketing leaders can use to get a directional high level view of where they're performing better or worse than other peers in their set.”

Benchmarks are directional, not definitive — use them to filter ideas, not make decisions

Benchmarks can surface where a company is over- or underperforming relative to peers, but they cannot tell you why or what to do about it. Carter's framework: use benchmarks to eliminate wrong priorities and focus engineering and marketing bandwidth on the right problems — but always pair data with product intuition. The danger is treating them as a decision engine rather than an input to judgment.