Thank you! Your point about "starting from small numbers" is something else I was considering -- obviously increasing from $1/week to $10/week of revenue over the course of three months is not that impressive, despite being a 20%/week growth rate!

I wonder if a good way to explain this would be via examples of (starting point, growth rate, duration) tuples and an "interesting" / "not interesting" assessment for each. (Can YC publish anonymized data on its portfolio companies?) This would allow readers to look for an example which roughly matches their performance -- which may sound silly to people in the valley who are surrounded by startups all day long, but there are a lot of us outside of the valley who rarely meet anyone working for a startup and never see any sort of concrete numbers like these.

I absolutely agree about keeping the guide short though -- this is more a matter of something I'd like to see you (or someone else at YC) write more about in the future.