2026-09-15

A pull isn’t a user.

We’ve started seeing Docker pulls for some of our new free products.

Great.

Except I have absolutely no idea whether they’re users.

One pull might be someone evaluating it.

Ten pulls might be one person’s CI system.

A download might never start.

An installation might run once and disappear.

A phone-home tells me something is alive, but even that doesn’t tell me whether somebody found it useful.

It’s remarkably easy to stare at the metric you happen to have and quietly turn it into the metric you wish you had.

Activity isn’t adoption.

And adoption isn’t value.

Eventually you have to measure the behaviour you actually care about.