Four numbers for a pot seller

A young woman in Taif starts selling painted clay plant pots from home, through her phone and a table at a weekend market. When friends ask how it is going, she answers the way most new sellers do: plenty of likes, a good Saturday, a lovely message from a stranger.

None of that tells her whether she has a business.

What tells her is simpler and less flattering. What does winning a new buyer cost her, counting the free pot sent to a cousin with a large following, the hot afternoons at the market table, the delivery she quietly paid for on the first order? How much does she actually keep from each sale once the clay, the paint and the pots that chipped in the box are paid for? Does a buyer come once for a birthday present and vanish, or come back every spring as the balcony fills up? And when that pot sits by someone's front door, how many of the friends who admire it end up asking where it came from?

Those four answers, taken together, are the business. If winning a buyer costs more than that buyer will ever leave behind, more Saturdays only mean losing money faster. If buyers stay for years and bring their neighbours, a slow start is nothing to worry about.

Most new sellers can recite their follower count to the nearest ten. Very few could say what one customer is worth to them.

The likes will tell her she is liked. Only the arithmetic will tell her whether she can keep going.