Your northstar metric may be broken 🛠
Choosing MAU/DAU because facebook doesn't make sense anymore.
Welcome to the 85th edition of the GrowthX Newsletter. Every Tuesday & Thursday I write a piece on startups & business growth. Today’s piece is going to 94,400+ operators & leaders from startups like Google, Stripe, Swiggy, Razorpay, CRED & more
The strongest & most misunderstood product metric is a company’s north star.
In simple words, north star is what keeps companies afloat. It’s a reflection of what problem the business is trying to solve, what is it that the users want, and what is it that the users will pay for.
The metric could be a north star if it
- Highlights the core business value prop
- Brings in the revenue
- Measures business growth
We’re talking about this today because we’ve often been in rooms where MAU/DAU (monthly active users/ daily active users) wins the north star race. Sure, go ahead, and track it, but it’s not always your north star.
For instance, Twitter tracks mDAU as their north star,
where M stands for monetizable.
This metric aligns all teams at Twitter to
work towards a common goal
brings in clarity and alignment in the prioritisation order
constantly allows them to measure success, impact, and progress
hold product teams accountable for their work & releases
The case with Google Drive
In its initial days, GD obsessed over the average drive storage of it’s users. It’s focus was to make users of Google Drive treat it as the primary repository holder. This immediately didn’t feed into monetisation, but it eventually did. Remember that upgrade you did to your personal Google Drive?
Similar case with GoJek
It was late 2018s and I used to lead growth at Dunzo and had gone to jam with hyperlocal players in APAC. It fundamentally double clicked on how rooted the GoJek’s “golden triangle strategy” was in it’s initial stage.Gojek team’s northstar back then was to get a user to transact atleast once with each of GoFood, GoRide, GoPay. This dramatically improved long term retention of a new user. This has now evolved into getting a user to transact atleast thrice onto atleast one product offering within 30 days, especially using GoPay.
So, how to find your north star? 🌟
This is where you ask - where am I and where I want to be. At GrowthX, we have leaders from unicorns to those who’re starting up, but all of them together in a room have learnt how to tear north star and go the breadth and depth of it.
Go execute this framework on your product, today.
Struggling to align your growth team?
We have been there and struggled at it. That’s why we focus on building the right process, alignment and OKR structures for growth teams. All of this and much more is what we discuss at the GrowthX experience.
The leaders at companies such as Meesho, Freshworks, Robinhood, Airbnb, Stripe, CRED, Razorpay, CRED & more have used these frameworks to scale their growth teams.
