Successful consumer founders know how to read the signals that matter (and ignore the ones that don't). In this session, investor and retail expert Sapna Shah will help you cut through the noise of early data and build the KPI foundation that reveals what your customers want, and what will drive your sustainable growth.

Leveraging her experience investing in and advising hundreds of consumer and retail startups, Sapna will show you how to:

• Identify the KPIs that matter in the earliest stages of DTC and retail

• Interpret early traction signals to validate demand and prioritize next steps

• Build a simple measurement framework that guides marketing, merchandising, and channel strategy

• Avoid the data traps that distract founders and slow down growth

After this session, you’ll leave with a customized KPI layer for your business — a focused, founder-friendly dashboard that clarifies what to track and why.

MEET YOUR HOST

Sapna Shah is an angel investor, retail/consumer expert and three-time entrepreneur. Through Red Giraffe, Sapna makes early-stage investments in sports, particularly in three verticals within sports: women's sports (teams/leagues), fan engagement and sports as community. She previously invested in retail and consumer startups. She has a particular focus on startups that have female and/or underrepresented founders, and invests in US-based companies.

Select investments include: Unrivaled Basketball, North Jersey Pro Soccer/NY Cosmos, Break Sports, Young King Hair Care, Realworld, Silk + Sonder, Findmine, Stantt, Monica + Andy, Iterate.ai and The Renatural.

Sapna founded Retail X Series, an ecosystem for retail and consumer startups in New York and around the US, which featured webinars, a podcast, Slack community and resources for early-stage founders revolutionizing the future of retail. Retail X provided targeted content with experts giving tactical advice on topics ranging from customer acquisition to financial modeling to early-stage fundraising.