How do you define progress in the earliest days after launch?

Working towards launching my app.

It's too early for meaningful data, growth trends, or any real signal on what's working, and I'm okay with that.

What I've noticed though is that the internet is full of milestone posts. First 100 users, $10k MRR, viral launches. And when you're pre-data, it's easy to accidentally use someone else's month 18 as your week 1 benchmark.

I'm not losing sleep over it, but it did get me thinking about how founders define meaningful progress before the numbers are there to tell the story.

My current approach is staying focused on qualitative signals are the right people finding it, are early users actually engaging, are conversations happening. But I'm curious what others have done:

• How did you measure progress in the first few weeks post-launch before you had real data?

• Did you set internal milestones, or just stay heads down and let the market respond?

• Looking back, what was actually a meaningful early signal vs what turned out to be noise?

Interested in how other makers have framed this stage practically.