The debate on performance evaluation of start-ups, especially the academic-based ones, is still open. The traditional assessment methods are designed for companies that operate in a structured manner, in which analysts have developed a certain experience and benchmarking capabilities. Therefore performance measurement systems suitable for this context have to be still identified and ‘calibrated’: stakeholders need specific tools in evaluating investments towards a spin-off rather than another. The paper proposes a partly qualitative and partly quantitative methodology to evaluate the performance of a spin-off. The methodology has been developed within an Erasmus+ research project, co-funded by the European Commission, called SOLA (Spin-off Lean Acceleration). The partners involved in this project are 9 European and Latin-American universities and their Technology Transfer Offices (TTOs). A new Canvas model (the so-called LAC- Lean Acceleration Canvas) was developed and tested, more specific and suited to the context of academic spin-offs. The methodology proposes to monitor the main risk areas (market, technological, implementation, governance, and financial risk). For each of these areas, at first a framework is proposed that can support the qualitative assessment of the potential. In the second part, a set of metrics is proposed that helps to monitor the performances and to understand if the spinoff is growing in the right direction. Moreover, the methodology was applied to the spin-offs at the University of Calabria (Italy). This paper describes the first results obtained by the application of the methodology.