Lets say you work at a startup that is growing insanely fast and you want to report financial metrics to investors, media etc. You can't use annual recurring revenue because 2026 is not over yet, and your company is so young it doesn't make sense to look back to last year. You can't use YoY because it would be some obscene figure (100000%) that definitely won't hold.

So the two best metrics are annualized recurring revenue (take last month * 12 or last 4 weeks * 13) and QoQ growth %.

There are two caveats:

- If the revenue is high quality (e.g. annual enterprise contracts, good NRR), then last 4 weeks * 13 is actually a conservative estimate as your company will likely continue to grow.

- But if the revenue is more volatile (e.g. consumption, token usage, bad NRR) then annualized recurring revenue can be used to hide worse performance because companies will juice revenue one month and report high "ARR"