The KPI You're Probably Ignoring
A new book by Jonathan Lo reframes what will actually grow your business
You track open rates, conversion rates, cost per acquisition, churn. You've got dashboards. You've got goals. But Jonathan Lo, founder of Salt Foundry Strategic Marketing and a familiar face in the Santa Cruz startup community, thinks most founders are measuring the wrong thing.
His new book, Keeping People Interested: How Leaders Use Marketing to Capture and Sustain Attention, reframes the entire focus for leaders around a single question: are people still paying attention to you? And more importantly, are they glad they are?
The title is a play on the acronym KPI. But Lo's argument is serious: in a world drowning in content, ads, and outreach, the brands that win aren't the loudest. They're the most relevant, the most empathetic, and the most generous with value before they ever make an ask.
The book's central thesis is refreshingly simple. To keep people interested, you have to be interested in them. That means understanding where your customers are in their journey — awareness, consideration, purchase, loyalty, advocacy — and meeting them there with something useful rather than something salesy. When you do that consistently, Lo argues, your marketing stops feeling like marketing. Customers don't just tolerate it. They thank you for it.
For startups in particular, Lo offers a dedicated framework in Chapter 7 called the SALT Framework, a structured approach to moving customers from first awareness all the way to advocacy. It's the kind of actionable scaffolding that early-stage founders rarely get from marketing books, which tend to skew either too theoretical or too tactical.
Lo also draws a useful distinction often blurred in startup circles: marketing is specifically about acquisition and bringing a product to market. Business strategy is everything else — product quality, pricing, operations, HR. Conflating the two leads founders to under-invest in or misdirect their marketing efforts at exactly the moment they can least afford to.
Keeping People Interested is a clear, practical read for any founder or operator who suspects their marketing is working harder than it's working smarter. It's available now on Amazon.
Jonathan Lo is available for speaking engagements, workshops, and author interviews. Learn more at jonathanklo.com/kpi.
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