New Users
The number of customers who activate their first paid subscription in a period, going from zero active seats to one or more.
◆ Count
Formula
Built from
What it measures
A gross count of brand-new customers won in the period — every customer who held zero active subscriptions at the start and one or more at the end. It excludes upsells and seat expansions to existing customers, reactivations of former customers, and any change to the base. It is inflow only, never a net figure.
Why it matters
New Users is the output of your acquisition engine — the count of logos your sales and marketing motion converted this period. Go-to-market leaders track it to know whether lead gen, conversion, and onboarding are working. Investors read new-user velocity as evidence the business can scale. Set against churn, it answers the survival question: are you winning customers faster than you lose them?
How to read it
Read New Users as an acquisition rate and always as a trend, not a single number. Compare this period to the prior one, to the same period last year, and to plan. Acceleration means demand generation is compounding; a flat or falling line points to one of three breaks — thinner pipeline, weaker close rates, or worse lead conversion. Decompose by segment, geography, or product line to find which. Then read it next to Net New Users: if new users are positive but net new is negative, the leak is churn, not acquisition.
What good looks like
Good
New Users grow steadily month over month, pace to or beat acquisition targets, and each cohort retains well into following periods.
Watch
New Users are flat or erratic — acquisition has plateaued or campaign performance swings; check whether churn is masking the real trend.
Bad
New Users decline sharply, signaling a dried-up pipeline, collapsing win rates, or onboarding that no longer converts.
Watch-outs
- Counting trials or freemium signups as New Users. A customer is new only when a paid subscription goes active — free trials and free-tier accounts that never convert are not New Users yet.
- Double-counting in multi-product businesses. When an existing customer adopts a second product they are not new; New Users counts unique new customers, not new products attached to a customer.
- Using the wrong date. The trigger is the subscription go-live (activation) date, not the contract-signed or invoice date — a deal closed in June that starts in July belongs to July.
- Reading the headcount without cohort quality. 100 New Users looks strong, but if 95 churn by month two your acquisition is hollow — always pair the count with new-user cohort retention.
Worked example
Hypothetical
In June, 25 companies that held zero subscriptions activate paid plans. Three existing customers also expanded seats and 12 customers churned, but neither touches this count. June New Users is 25; June Net New Users is 25 − 12 = 13.
Variants & windows
The same metric re-expressed by a mechanical transform — a trailing window, a growth rate, a per-unit scaling, or a book/segment cut. Each is computed from New Users above.
- New Contracted Users (T3M) New · Trailing 3-month · Contracted book
- New Contracted Users (TTM) New · Trailing 12-month · Contracted book
- New Live Users New
- New Live Users (T3M) New · Trailing 3-month
- New Live Users (TTM) New · Trailing 12-month