Beyond revenue: how Hugo Galvao measures a pet business

Revenue is the number every dashboard leads with, and it is also the number that hides the most. A pet e-commerce store can close a strong month in total sales while losing customers faster than it gains new ones, a pattern that only shows up once someone looks past the top line. Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho, founder and director of Enjoy Pets, treats revenue as a lagging signal, useful for reporting a quarter but poor at predicting the next one.

The mistake is not tracking revenue, it is stopping there. A single sales figure cannot distinguish between a store growing on repeat buyers and one that spends heavily on ads to replace customers who never come back. Separating those two stories requires different metrics entirely, ones that describe behavior rather than totals.

The myth that more sales means a healthier business

It is tempting to read a rising revenue chart as proof that everything underneath it works. Marketing spend can push that number up for months while retention quietly erodes, because paid traffic buys a first purchase, not a second one. A store can look successful on paper for an entire year before the acquisition cost catches up with it.

Hugo Galvao points out that this gap shows up first in the numbers nobody screenshots for a report: how many customers from three months ago placed another order and how much it currently costs to replace the ones who did not. Revenue answers what came in. It says nothing about whether the business will still be standing without constant new spending.

What retention and repeat purchase rate actually reveal

Repeat purchase rate, the share of customers who order again within a defined window, tends to matter more in pet retail than in most categories, since food, litter and medication are recurring needs by nature. A store with a low repeat rate in this segment is not failing to find customers, it is failing to keep the ones it already earned, which is a more expensive problem to fix later.

Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho describes tracking this figure alongside customer acquisition cost as the pairing that tells the real story: rising sales next to a falling repeat rate signals a business buying growth it cannot sustain. The opposite, flat sales with climbing repeat purchases, often points to a healthier foundation than the revenue chart alone would suggest.

Reputation and delivery reliability as business metrics

Marketplace reputation score, review volume and delivery reliability rarely appear next to revenue on a founder's dashboard, yet they shape every future sale more directly than any single month's total. A dip in delivery reliability shows up weeks later as fewer repeat orders and lower ranking in marketplace search, a delay that makes the connection easy to miss if nobody is watching the metric itself.

At Enjoy Pets, in the way Hugo Galvao frames it, reputation score functions as an early warning system rather than a vanity number: a slipping score flags an operational problem before it shows up as a revenue drop months later. Catching that lag early is often the difference between a small fix and a lost season of sales.

Choosing the metrics that predict, not just report

None of this argues for ignoring revenue, only for refusing to let it stand alone. A useful set of metrics for a digital pet business includes repeat purchase rate, customer acquisition cost, reputation score, and delivery reliability alongside sales, because together they explain why the top line moves, not just that it did.

Hugo Galvao de Franca Filho argues that the businesses built to last are the ones tracking what predicts next quarter, not only what summarizes the last one. Revenue will always be the number investors and dashboards ask for first. Whether it holds up depends on the numbers most founders never bother to check.